Unified Criteria for Differentiating Freight Forwarding and Transportation Contracts in the Context of Legal Liability

Abstract

Transport law is ambivalent from the methodological point of view. It entails different institutions and legal relations interconnected with each other. A unified document that would cover all the regulations on transport relations does not exist in democratic Western states. For this reason, there is a discourse about the “fragmented” legal substance of the law, which regulates relationships governed by different legislations, yet are closely related and similar. Transport law is divided into several levels. The first is the national, i.e. the first stage of regulation. The core agreements that form the backbone of transport law are regulated within civil and commercial codes, followed by the second level of regulation – supranational regulations of the European Union. The present article is dedicated, on the one hand, to the study of the generalized qualifying criteria for freight forwarding and transportation contracts based on the Unified Act – FIATA, and, on the other hand, to the analysis of the regulatory models of Georgian and German law in the context of their compliance and harmonization with unified standards. Studying the mentioned generalized criteria at the supranational level is of immense practical importance in terms of distinguishing the functions and duties of the carrier and the freight forwarder, as well as the corresponding legal liability regimes. The study also reviews international efforts of the unification of the liability of freight forwarders. It highlights the need to expand contractual autonomy at a unified level in the context of the deregulation of freight forwarder liability.