Sailing in All Winds: Extraterritorial Regulation as a Trigger for Self-Regulatory Practices in Shipping Industry

The regulation of private activities that take place overseas has received significant attention in the legal scholarship. The traditional discussion of the topic observes such regulation from the perspectives of public international law principles of jurisdiction or private international law conflict of laws rules. The present article contributes to the discussion from the perspective of private parties engaged in shipping activities, who face an increasing need of compliance with different regulatory acts of extraterritorial application. It argues that the proliferation of such acts incentivizes private parties to include regulatory interests in their business activities.
The article further suggests that extraterritorial regulation can serve as a trigger for transfer and intrinsic adoption of state’s regulatory interest by private parties. It observes the examples of such ‘privatization of extraterritoriality’ in corporate compliance policies and contractual CSR clauses used by shipping companies, noting their spillover effects over other parties. It further notes that the proliferation of extraterritorial regulation sometimes results in the universalization of responses from private parties, as acquisition of regulatory interest untied from its nation-state origins. The concluding section puts the observed phenomenon into a broader picture, discussing the contribution of extraterritorial regulation to the mechanisms of private governance.