General Information

The Southampton Law School is delighted to offer two opportunities for interdisciplinary PhD studentships starting in October 2015. Candidates will submit their online application by April, 20, 2015. As part of their online application, candidates shall submit a response in writing, maximum 1500 words, to one of the following questions:

• “What key principles should be considered for the future use of seabed mineral resources in the deep ocean?”
• “What policy developments are required to make the oceans and seas ‘an enabling environment for development for the benefit of all’ (United Nations Development Strategy Beyond 2015)?”

Potential candidates will be interviewed. The provisional dates for the interviews are 27-28 April 2015.

Information on how to apply can be found on the following website:http://www.southampton.ac.uk/law/postgraduate/research_degrees/apply.page .    

Applicants should specify in their application the name of the project for which they apply and that the submission is made under the ‘SMMI Understanding Maritime Futures Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholarships’ scheme. Please note that these studentships are only open to candidates from the UK/EU.

1. International Fisheries Law and Mathematics/ Statistics: Quantifying the Reparation Obligations Arising from Breaches of Quotas

Compliance and enforcement are perennial weaknesses of international law; this is equally true of international fisheries law in terms of the non-implementation of the legal consequences for States of exceeding quotas held under a regional fisheries management organisation (RFMO). At present, when a State exceeds its fishing quota in a given year the responses of other States involved in the fishery are ad hoc and essentially political whereby the State sometimes suffers no penalty at all. This does not achieve the restoration of the fish stock to the size it would have been had the State complied with its original quota obligation and raises the following question: who should bear the resulting loss, the State or the world at large? The project aims to end this stagnation in the law and propel the debate forward by recourse to insights from other, specifically mathematical, disciplines.

We are looking for a PGR with background in both law and mathematics. One of the aims of the project will be to develop quantitative management measures that deliver robust outcomes in the face of incomplete data and considerable uncertainty about fishing, fish stocks and the wider ecosystem. This will require analysis and identification of the factors and their impacts on fish stocks for integration into a predictive compensation/ depensation model and revealing the relationships between the distribution of fishes and the impacting factors.

The successful candidate will be supervised by Dr Andrew Serdy (Law) and Prof. Zudi Lu (Mathematical Sciences).

2. Autonomy and Liability for Unmanned Ships

Unmanned maritime vehicles operate with varying levels of human remote control, up to the point of full autonomy. These are used for marine scientific research, surveying of offshore installations as well as in naval operations and search and rescue. The size of these unmanned maritime vehicles is increasing and the possibility of the development of prototype unmanned ships is presently under serious consideration. Legal liability, where unspecified or uncertain operates as a serious barrier to the investment in technological development and its commercial application and as it stands however there are very serious issues regarding the ability to operate such ships under the existing regulatory framework developed under the International Maritime Organization and whether such ships will be considered as ships under international law.

The project will require a PGR with a background in law, and/or marine engineering concepts. The project entails firstly an analysis of the existing international maritime regulations and conventions (e.g. COLREGS, SOLAS, and LLMC) and the extent to which they apply to autonomous ships. With this considered, the project will then require a pragmatic liability study in which different potential accident scenarios will be mapped and the legal liability of the respective stakeholders defined. This will require sound legal knowledge but also collaboration with the Engineering Faculty so as to consider how the degree of vessel autonomy impacts upon the liability question.

The successful candidate will be supervised by Prof. Michael Tsimplis (Law); Dr Alexandros Ntovas (Law) and Dr Nicholas Townsend (Engineering and the Environment).