Friday, March 29, 2024

Let's discuss charter party disputes.

The word charter-party is clear to commercial people.

What about the word dispute”?

Construed in its context, it has been a source of debate over the years. As said:

Two men have an argument over who won the University Boat Race in a particular year. In ordinary language, they have a dispute over whether it was Oxford or Cambridge. The fact that it can be easily and immediately demonstrated beyond doubt that one is right and the other is wrong does not and cannot mean that that dispute did not in fact exist. Because one man can be said to be indisputably right and the other indisputably wrong does not, in my view, entail that there was therefore never any dispute between them.

-Saville J, 1990

Why do contractual disputes occur and continue to arise?

[t]he parties to a contract sometimes have a positive interest in obscurity, in lack of clarity. Both sides to a negotiation may be content to include an ambiguous provision in it, on the basis that, if they try and spell it out more clearly the deal may fall apart, and they would rather leave it unclear – not least because it will probably never lead to a dispute anyway. So, while judges and other law-makers should try and keep uncertainty in the law to a minimum, what with human fallibility, inability to predict the future and commercial realism, it is unrealistic to believe that the outcome of every dispute could and should be confidently predicted…

– Lord Neuberger, 2016

The other role of substantive commercial law that I want to highlight derives from the fundamental fact that contracts are always incomplete. They are incomplete for two reasons. First, even the most elaborate and comprehensive written contract cannot anticipate in advance every possible event that might arise in relation to a transaction and stipulate what is to happen if the event occurs… Second, attempting to negotiate a contract which anticipates and provides in advance for as many contingencies as possible is time-consuming, costly and can be counterproductive…

-Lord Leggatt, 2021

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