The Law of International Civil Aviation Liability

The Montreal Convention governs the liability of air carriers worldwide. Building on a distinguished tradition of scholarship, this treatise offers a complete and current statement of the international air carrier liability system, for the judges, practitioners, and scholars who must apply and interpret it.

In sixteen chapters, it traverses the whole regime: the Convention's origins and its supersession of the Warsaw system; the scope of its application; liability for injury and death, delay, baggage, and cargo; the limits and defences; and its reception in the national courts. Throughout, the exposition is anchored in the treaty's travaux préparatoires and in the most recent jurisprudence across the major aviation jurisdictions - a genuinely comparative account of how the Convention is applied today.

Three contributions give the book its force. It explains the Convention's true structure: a self-contained code - complete, mandatory, and exclusive wherever it is engaged - that admits no recourse to domestic contract, tort, or equity principles to ground a claim or construe its terms; a structure so often misunderstood that many courts and litigants have gone astray. It supplies what the literature has never made plain: a step-by-step method for converting the Convention's unit of account, Special Drawing Rights, into the currency of the forum. And it does not stop at exposition: it identifies where the regime falls short and sets out the specific reforms needed to close those gaps.

Rigorous, current, and unafraid to argue, this is the modern reference on international air carrier liability, for everyone who must apply, interpret, adjudicate, or reform the Montreal Convention.