This is the first book that provides an overview of modern maritime ports from a legal perspective. Moreover, it provides a basic toolkit for the establishment of a legal doctrine for seaports, and the tools of the toolkit mentioned are the very few legal rules specifically targeting the port, which are thus examined instead of other more established disciplines such as the law of the sea or the law Transportation.

It is a necessary first step towards giving seaports the status they deserve in legal studies. Despite centuries of international law studies and decades of EU law development, seaports remained stuck in uncertainty.

From the perspective of the law of the sea, seaports belong to the Earth, an approach often clearly reflected in national maritime legislation. Other branches of international law do not focus on seaports because they are considered to belong to the sea.

For their part, port communities have benefited from the concept of "port privacy". In recent decades, the container industry has transformed ports into key hubs of the globalized economy, but also vital checkpoints for the war on terror, because of the security risks posed by millions of closed containers that are spread all over the world.

Moreover, tragic maritime incidents have shown that seaports are the only reliable sea guards, the only places where regular ship inspections are possible. This has led to the adoption of specific international and European rules.

However, these rules remain fragmented, highly specialized and technical; as such, they are not appropriate for the establishment of an organic legal seaport system: this objective can only be achieved with a significant contribution of legal doctrine.