7th Annual Cape Town Convention Academic Project conference
On 12th and 13th September, the 7th Cape Town Convention Academic Project conference was held in Oxford at the Blavatnik School of Government. It was attended by over 100 participants, and included two full days of presentations and discussions, chaired by Professor Louise Gullifer (University of Oxford) and Professor Jeffrey Wool (University of Washington).
The first two sessions focused on the draft MAC protocol. Will Brydie-Watson (UNIDROIT) and Rob Cowan (Aviereto) compared the MAC Protocol to the other protocols, and this was followed by a presentation by Ken Warwick (Warwick Associates) of the recently completed economic analysis of the MAC protocol, on which Professor Jeffrey Wool (University of Washington) commented.
After lunch, there was an analysis of recent Irish cases involving the International Registry for aircraft objects by Mathesons, and an update on the preparation of the next edition of the official commentaries by Professor Sir Roy Goode (University of Oxford). This was followed by a paper from Bruce Whittaker, (Ashursts and the University of Melbourne) on which Howard Rosen (Rail Working Group) commented, and a paper jointly written by Professor Charles Mooney (University of Pennsylvania) and Professor Jonathan Harris (KCL, Serle Court) on complex and difficult questions on the conflict of law rules as applied to the Cape Town Convention. The conference dinner was held at Harris Manchester College.
The following day opened with a joint paper from Kenneth Gray (Norton Rose Fulbright) and Professor Jeffrey Wool on the implications of the Cape Town Convention for the use of trusts in transactions, on which Philip Wood commented. This was followed by a paper by Professor Anna Veneziano (UNIDROIT) on the Contours of ‘Commercial reasonableness’ under the Cape Town Convention on which Professor Edwin Peel (University of Oxford) commented. After lunch there was an updated on the Cape Town Convention compliance project by Professor Jeffrey Wool and Jasmine Jin, which was followed by a paper on the meaning of ‘procedural law’ under the Cape Town Convention, on which Professor Richard Salter QC (3VB, University of Oxford) commented.
The conference finished with a lively discussion of two papers from Professor Bryan Havel (McGill University) and Professor Gilles Cuniberti (University of Luxembourg) on international law and court decisions under the Cape Town Convention.
The Cape Town Convention Academic Project is a joint undertaking between the University of Oxford Faculty of Law and the University of Washington School of Law and aspects of the Project are also being undertaken under the auspices of UNIDROIT.