Baku State University

ziya.shivakhanli@gmail.com 

With the development of international trade in the last decades of the nineteenth century, balancing interests of the ship owners and the cargo owners became one of the much-debated topics in maritime law. Some are of the view that there is an imbalance in favor of the carriers. The reason is as the economic power of the carriers was considerably increased, contracts of the carriage of goods by sea overloaded with exception clauses intended to exonerate the carriers from liability for almost every imaginable situation. Starting from the Bill of Ladings, these exceptions have been established through national legislations and subsequently transformed into uniform international law.