The Acts on Third Parties Rights: Comparison and Examination - Lijie Song

This event has been postponed and will be rescheduled to a later date.

The Edinburgh Centre for Private Law and the Edinburgh Centre for Commercial Law present

The Acts on Third Parties Rights: Comparison and Examination

About the seminar
The past twenty years have seen a successive statuary reform of the privity doctrine in different common law jurisdictions, e.g., England and Wales, Singapore and Hong Kong. Most recently, Scotland has enforced its own statute on this issue, i.e., the Contract (Third Parties Rights) Act 2017. Almost two decades after its predecessor the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 being enacted by England and Wales, it is time to consider how well it circumvents the problems left by the latter and the equivalent statutes in the above-mentioned jurisdictions.
This seminar will particular focus on two respects. First, due to the nature of carriage of goods by sea, air, rail and road, there are usually many third parties involved in these operations. Because of this, the different international conventions on the carriage of goods have already addressed the third-party issues. This leads to overlaps between the conventions and the Acts. The English and Scottish Acts adopt different approaches regarding the overlaps, which deserves a close comparison. Secondly, although both arbitration and exclusive jurisdiction clauses have given rise to problems in case law when it comes to third parties, both of the Acts are silent on exclusive jurisdiction clauses but only expressly deal with arbitration clauses. As most commercial contracts contain exclusive jurisdiction clauses, it is worth examining the position of the exclusive jurisdiction clauses under the Acts.

About the speaker
Dr Lijie Song is a Lecturer in Maritime and Commercial Law at University of Essex. She was awarded PhD by University of Southampton with the thesis entitled “Third Parties’ Protection in Carriage of Goods by Sea”. She obtained LLM from the same institution and LLB from Dalian Maritime University, China. Lijie is currently teaching International Trade Law, Marine Insurance and Admiralty Law. Her main research interests include international commercial sales, carriage of goods by sea, marine insurance and international commercial arbitration.

This event is free and open to all. No registration necessary.