Activity

Dear YLC’ers: The MLA Uniformity Committee and its chair, Professor Michael Sturley, have invited YLC members to participate in a joint project with the Uniformity Committee to research and present on various circuit conflicts in U.S. maritime law. We hope that this will be the first in a series of Uniformity Committee presentations featuring YLC talent! Details regarding the scope of the project from Professor Sturley are below. If you are interested and able to present at the Uniformity Committee meeting this October, please contact Imran Shaukat ([email protected]) and Professor Sturley ([email protected]).

“For the next two meetings of the Uniformity Committee (Scottsdale in October; New York next May), my fellow committee officers and I are interested in reviewing the extent of dis-uniformity in U.S. maritime law. More specifically, we would like to have a series of presentations with each presenter discussing existing circuit conflict in a particular area of maritime law.

For example, a presenter assigned to Carriage of Goods could talk about the conflict between the Seventh Circuit and most other circuits on whether a carrier loses the benefit of the COGSA package limitation in the event of an unreasonable deviation; the conflict between the Third Circuit and most other circuits (except the First Circuit) on the validity of the so-called “fair opportunity” doctrine; the conflict between the First and Ninth Circuits on the one hand and the Fourth and Fifth Circuits on the other hand over the impact of a bill of lading statement calling for the application of COGSA in domestic trade; etc.

Our hope is that members of your committee would be interested in undertaking the research, and that you would assign your members to investigate various topics. We would like to get as broad coverage as possible, but the selection of topic areas would depend to some extent on the interests of your members and their willingness to take on various topics. In defining possible topics, we might look to MLA committees’ responsibilities (e.g., Carriage of Goods, Marine Insurance, Practice & Procedure, Salvage, etc.; your liaisons to each committee might be an obvious choice to conduct the research in that particular area) or the chapter headings in an Admiralty casebook.

I think there is still plenty of time for at least some of your members to complete their research in time to present in Scottsdale. (I also understand that some firms are more willing to send young lawyers to resort meetings if they are presenting a paper!) And of course we have even more time before the next New York meeting.”