Ship is the prerequisite essential physical facility for maritime companies. Therefore, most of maritime legal cases are based on the ship. However, ship has several special features because ship has also the real-estate-like characteristics as being the movable asset. Especially, Korean Commercial Law admits exceptions to the general principles of the Korean Civil Law, describing the agreement between the parties shall be effective for transmission on the ship which can be registered and enrolled. Moreover, the disclosure system of the ship in Korea has been adopted dualism by both the registration for the purpose of the disclosure for the right in the private law and the enrollment for governing authorities in the shipping process on the need. For such reasons, several legal cases occur on the ownership of ship. Therefore, the legal principle on the ownership of ship is need to be reviewed at the present and, for that, considered with the English Law as the comparative legal study. Specifically, this paper describes, first of all, the historical development on the English Law related the ownership of ship, the registration of the ownership of ship, the qualifications for ownership of the British ship, the Merchant Shipping Act on 1995, then, considered the transmission problems of the ownership of ship, namely, the transfer of the ownership and the transmission of the ownership, and the transmission of the ownership of ship on the transaction of ship, etc. To conclude, the results are summarized and implications are suggested to the Korean Law.
선박소유권공동 소유선박의 등록상선법물품매매법선박의 매매소유권의 이전소유권의 양도ownership of shipco-ownershipRegistration of shipMerchant Shipping ActSale of Goods Actsale of shiptransmission of ownershiptransfer of ownership