Foreword

• Author: Rose-Marie B Antoine
• Profession: PhD, is an Attorney-at-Law and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus as well as Programme Director of the Faculty?s LL.M. Programme
• Pages: 7-8

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Foreword

A.R. Carnegie

THE OFFSHORE LAW WORKSHOP in St. Lucia in December 1998 was

one of many regional conferences and seminars, on matters of West Indian

legal interest, which the Faculty of Law of the University of the West Indies

has sponsored over the years. Publication of proceedings in book form has, on

the other hand, not always followed, and this volume is accordingly

particularly welcome.

Offshore law has been of increasing importance to the economies of many

West Indian countries. The financial services industry which it supports has

been seen as one of the avenues of diversification offering an escape from the

monocultural constraints of the plantation economy heritage. And although

tourism has provided successfully some emancipation from those economic

constraints, the offshore sector is of value as a potential reserve resource for

that new single industry dependence.

This importance has for some time had its influence on the activity of the

Faculty of Law. The Faculty’s Caribbean Law Institute Centre and the Florida

State University based Caribbean Law Institute, with which the Centre is

associated, mounted with funding from the United States Agency for

International Development a seminar on offshore insurance law in Anguilla

in 1994, with the Faculty’s present Dean, Mr. Andrew Burgess, as one of the

main presenters.

This later and more extensive workshop in St.Lucia in 1998, pursuant of

its regional design in this instance, attracted an audience by no means confined

to the country where it took place, but drawn from the university’s contributing

countries across the Caribbean. Nor was the economic significance of the

workshop only in its subject-matter for the Faculty of Law, it was the first

instance of a self-financing project of this kind, leading the way for other

activities which have come to serve a market no longer confined even to the

University’s catchment area.

The workshop was principally facilitated by the organising initiative of

Dr. Rose-Marie Antoine the editor of this work, and the Caribbean Law Institute

Centre co-operated as a co-sponsor. The government of St. Lucia co-hosted

the workshop and graciously provided hospital services. Dr. Antoine brought