ABSTRACT
2.01 Much has been said in favour and against unification of maritime law through international conventions. Although it is a fact that the road to uniformity is long and not infrequently full of obstacles, there is no valid alternative to international conventions. In fact any form of rules that the parties may incorporate in their contracts, besides being frequently adopted by a limited number of persons, yield to national mandatory rules. This of course is not the case with model laws, but the problem remains of the extent to which their provisions are actually incorporated into national laws as well as of the need for identifying the proper law of the contract. This type of research may be done by courts, but not by the industry when negotiating individual contracts. With respect to the international carriage of goods, the proper law may differ according to the place of receipt and of delivery of the goods 1 and, therefore, it is practically impossible to take each time into account the mandatory provisions of the proper law.
