Voyage Charters by Julian Cooke, Timothy Young, Andrew Taylor, John D. Kimball, David Martowski, and Leroy Lambert

Abstract

Voyage Charters by Julian Cooke, Timothy Young, Andrew Taylor, John D. Kimball, David Martowski and Leroy Lambert. Published by Lloyds of London Press Ltd, (London. 1993, xcvii, 907 and Index 20 pp.). Hardback UK £125. Some 15 years after the publication of Time Charters (3rd ed., 1989) it is a pleasure to welcome the arrival of its companion volume, Voyage Charters. Regular users of the earlier treatise will experience no difficulty in handling its successor, since the authors have studiously followed the format adopted in Time Charters. Two standard voyage charter forms are used as the basis for a clause-by-clause commentary, successive sections being devoted to the treatment of English and US law and practice respectively. On this occasion the Gencon 1976 form is selected for the more extensive basic commentary, while the importance of the tanker trade to this type of documentation is recognized by the more selective treatment of the provisions of the Asbatankvy form. A third and substantial section of the text is devoted to a detailed commentary on the English law interpretation of The Hague and Hague-Visby Rules. While recognizing that one or other sets of Rules is frequently incorporated into charterparties it is an unexpected but welcome bonus to discover some 100 pages of text in a volume on voyage charters being devoted to a detailed discussion on the effect of these Rules. A final and valuable group of appendices include all the relevant English and US legislation and a selection of seven representative voyage charter forms. This is a substantial and well-presented piece of work running to 805 pages of text, me English commentary being provided by the combined efforts of Julian Cooke, Timothy Young and Andrew Taylor, while responsibility for the US Commentary is undertaken by John Kimball, David Martowski and LeRoy Lambert. This volume has clearly had a long period of gestation and the authors recognize that owing to the complexity of the subject, it ‘remains …