ABSTRACT
The purpose of the current chapter is to give a general presentation of the regimes governing the carrier’s liability for carriage of goods that are relevant from the perspective of the current thesis. 1 Whilst there are multimodal dimensions of these regimes, which will be discussed in Chapter 3, et seq., the contemporary legal approach to transport is essentially unimodal. Although attempts are made to escape these unimodal constraints, 2 multimodal transport is inevitably dissembled into its unimodal segments. The unimodal approach is caused by, but also the reason for, the fact that the regulatory regimes classify transport based on the transport mode used. The research questions posed in the current work 3 fall back on this unimodal approach – the relationship between the multimodal practice and the unimodal regulations. Accordingly, in order to present the reader with a background, and legal context, to the research questions, the rules governing the carriers’ liability for carriage by road, rail, air and sea will be presented. In order to present the conventions in a setting, first a very brief historical resume will be given.
