The Analysis Of The Rotterdam Rules’ Limitations

The introduction of the Rotterdam Rules is a major event in the international maritime transport legal developments in recent years. Its appearance has brought perfect praise on the system while brought lots of controversies on the rules’innovation. Whether to join the Convention or not is a hot issue on discussion in Chinese government and academic world. The current attitudes to the Rules are almost positive publicities, fewer negative explanation and prompts. The study of the Rotterdam Rules in our country should proceed from reality, premise on the maritime and trade power and rely on the actual benefit and necessity. Give the further excavations, summarizes and demonstrations of the lacks and non-progressiveness in the Rules, so can do to avoid weaknesses and disadvantages. In this paper, the author want to explore the limitations of the Rotterdam Rules from the point of view of the legal theory and empirical analysis, and put forward recommendations to deal with for our specific situation.This article includes introduction, five chapters of text and conclusions. The introduction section explains the significance of the topic, research contents, research methods and research status. Chapter one is an overview on background of the Rotterdam Rules. From three aspects this chapter discusses and demonstrates the historical inevitability of the introduction of the Rotterdam Rules, then analyses its three main features, which have a general understanding of the main content of the Convention. Chapter two gives a comparative study and analysis of the Rules’alteration with the conventional maritime transport international conventions. This chapter including both update existing rules and creation on top of the rules aims at revealing the different historical conditions and economic base under different regulations changes. Chapter three analysis the limitations of the Rotterdam Rules from legal theory, focuses on the three aspects legislative purposes, formulation of law and value of law, and analyses inner of the jurisprudence deeply. Its also explains the conflict due to the presence of three aspects which makes the Convention is theoretically inadequate. Chapter four empirically analyses the limitations of the Rotterdam Rules which principally analyses the acceptance of the Convention, the innovative of operability, as well as the conflict provisions and other aspects. Chapter five is the influence of the Rotterdam Rules in China, and analyses the choice of China’s accession to the Rotterdam Rules, then proposes to modify and improve our legal system.