Marine Insurance Act 1906

1.1 Commercial law in the common law world rests upon contractual principles developed by the courts, with refinements for specific classes of contract where necessary to meet the needs of business. Legislation has for the most part intervened only to lay down regulatory structures and, latterly, to protect consumers. Common law judges, unlike their civil law counterparts, do not operate under codes which seek to lay down general principles or specific rules designed to meet, or at least to provide guidance for, every eventuality. However, for a quarter of a decade, the encyclopaedic learning of Sir Mackenzie Chalmers – Parliamentary draftsman, civil servant and judge – led to an experiment with codification, not in the civil law sense but rather in the form of a series of pieces of legislation aimed at reproducing the effect of 150 years of judicial decisions. Chalmers drafted, most significantly, the Factors Act 1882, the Bills of Exchange Act 1882, the Sale of Goods Act 1893 and the Marine Insurance Act 1906, and indeed wrote texts on these subjects. These pieces of legislation were adopted, in most cases more or less verbatim, by other jurisdictions. The Marine Insurance Act 1906 was reproduced with variations in Australia (1909), New Zealand (1908), Hong Kong and Singapore, and Canada ultimately came to the party with the Marine Insurance Act 1993. The legislation is much the same in all of these jurisdictions, although there are variations of substance. ¹ As far as Australia is concerned, the 1909 Act has been amended on a number of occasions, but an important formal difference is the introductory provisions in that Act appear at the end of the 1906 Act, with the effect that the numbering of the Australian sections is different. In this paper we adhere to the UK section numbering unless otherwise stated, but for those readers who wish to translate “English English” into “Australian English”, just add six.