An Analysis On Legal Problems Of International Freight Forwarding

International freight forwarding,as a new service industry,is developing with great innovation.It plays an important role in the international trade and shipping transportation.With the emergence of liner shipping,international freight forwarder has expanded its business into the field of NVOCC and logistics.Its role in the transportation has changed from traditional agent to the carrier.Since the opening up,Chinese international freight forwarding has developed quickly.Yet with the accession to the WTO,international freight forwarder in China is facing new challenge.For Chinese international freight forwarders,to expand their business into the third-party logistics so as to improve the business capacity is the best way for the international freight forwarder,Especially when they find it has become difficult to be a middle dealer.By this way,it can strengthen its core ability and bring in more market value.Freight forwarding has its own history,in which freight forwarders have been making efforts to meet the increasing demand of their customers and the connotation has been substantially enriched at the same time.The legal status of the freight forwarder is too complicated for agency theory of general civil law system to govern.Thorough comprehensions of different roles of a freight forwarder is essential to clarify legal rights and obligations between freight forwarders and their customers in practice,Presently,the basic legal structure of freight forwarding has been set up in our country,but it is far from perfect, which has become the bottle-neck of the development of international freight forwarding market.To settle this,a freight forwarding law is urgently needed.Chapter one is mainly about general introduction of international freight forwarding, which starts from the very beginning of the history of international freight forwarding, examining its significant connotation historically,so as to demonstrate the reason why the status of international freight forwarder is so complex.Common agency business occupies only a small portion in the whole business scope,while it is aiming at participating into goods transportation,developing multimodal transportation,providing service into the third-party logistics,and increasing its profitability.A general suggestion is also presented in this chapter to deal with the setting up of legal framework of our freight forwarder,and so on.Chapter II stresses on the business analysis of the traditional freight forwarder.In order to research the legal status of the freight forwarder in traditional agency business,we have to discuss the differences between Continental agency law and Anglo-American agency law. This chapter also compares agency rules in our country's regulations with foreign agency laws,concluding that the freight forwarder should pay attention to the rights and obligations and other issues important to an agent.The third chapter makes a massive discussion of the freight forwarder business.As an independent contractor,he has to bear the responsibility and obligation,when the freight forwarder changes into a NVOCC and a MTO.This chapter engages into the legal status and obligations of NVOCC and MTO operator in detail,and brings in useful suggestions for he freight forwarder's operation in practice.The fourth chapter presents some pioneering thoughts on the freight forwarder's acting as the third-party logistics operator.This chapter begins from the possibility of the freight forwarder's extending into the third-party logistics,then researches on the status of the third-party logistics and finally analyzes the traditional business mode and carrier mode of the international freight forwarder.The main part of this paper is to analyze the liability system and the differences between the third-party logistics and freight forwarder.Some relevant solutions are also brought forward in this chapter,hoping to exert some help in settling the problems in freight forwarding market.