This chapter examines the interpretation of marine insurance contracts premises, first, that marine insurance law should not be seen in isolation like the Dead Sea. The second premise is that a trend to something must be away from something else the base of rules of interpretation received. There Lord Hoffmann referred to court decisions in the previous 20 years and claimed that almost all “the old intellectual baggage of ‘legal’ interpretation had been discarded”. Traditionally, apart from hearing evidence of trade custom, English courts stopped there; they admitted evidence of matters outside the formal contract boundary only in cases of ambiguity or absurdity. As regards contract terms that derive from international regimes and must come under the consideration of foreign courts, “it is desirable in the interests of uniformity that their interpretation should not be rigidly controlled by domestic precedents of antecedent date, but rather that the language of the rules should be construed on broad principles of general acceptation”.