Providing the compass for navigating Shipping Law

The Faculty's Shipping Law specialisation is headed up by Associate Professor Graham Bradfield. This field of law plays a pivotal role in the global economy, facilitating the movement of goods, fostering trade relationships, and ensuring maritime safety. As the backbone of international trade, shipping law governs a wide array of legal issues, including contracts, insurance, environmental regulations, and admiralty matters.

A postgraduate qualification in shipping law offers profound advantages for aspiring legal professionals. It will equip you with an in-depth understanding of the complex legal framework surrounding maritime activities, enabling you to navigate disputes and provide expert counsel to multinationals, shipping companies, port authorities, trade authorities and representatives, and government bodies. A specialised postgraduate qualification in shipping law enhances your prospects for opportunities in law firms, multinational corporations, maritime arbitration centres, and government agencies, amongst many other entities. 

If you're a law graduates seeking to specialise in a shipping & maritime law, or a practising maritime professiona wanting to expand your legal knowledge, or someone passionate about environmental and international law looking to address the evolving challenges of the maritime & shipping industry, our postgraduate diploma, LLM and Professional Masters are all good options for you.

Programme structure

Each of the postgraduate options offer different requirements and structures, and are taught accordingly. While courses are taught at the applicable level, the requirements across the qualifications is the same in terms of course work - requiring the completion of three core courses, and a choice of one of the two electives on offer. The remaining requirements depend on which qualification you are pursuing and can include additional research tasks for each course (professional master's); or a dissertation (25,000) on a topic that you propose. 

Further information is in the Faculty's handbook and on our Programmes pages.

Core courses

  1. Maritime Law
  2. Carriage of Goods by Sea
  3. Marine Insurance Law

Electives

  1. Admiralty Jurisdiction and Practice
  2. International Law of the Sea

Programme codes

Postgraduate diploma: LG002CML09

Professional Master's: LM025CML09

LLM/ MPhil: LM003CML09/LM002CML09