Contract Law in the CISG: Civil Law, Common Law or a Third Way?

DÁRIO MOURA VICENTE

ABSTRACT: The CISG is unquestionably one of the most successful contemporary instruments of International Trade Law: less than half a century after its adoption, it has secured the accession or ratification of nearly one hundred countries, among them several of the main trading nations of the world. The Convention’s approach to the unification of the law on contracts for the international sale of goods is based on a compromise between the Common Law and Civil Law traditions, albeit with a predominance of the former, combined with the applicability of the domestic laws of the Convention’s contracting states to matters in respect of which such a compromise could not be reached. This approach is one of the Convention’s strengths, since it has succeeded in mitigating the existing legal barriers to cross-border trade. But it also constitutes a clear limitation to the uniformity of international sales law that the Convention was intended to provide. Extending the scope of the Convention’s provisions to issues on which no consensus was reached during its negotiations is perhaps one of the main challenges faced by UNCITRAL as the centenary approaches of the launch of the work that led, on Ernst Rabel’s initiative, to the conclusion of the Convention.

KEYWORDS: CISG, Civil Law, Common Law, Conflict of Laws, Contract Law, Unification of Private Law

Information
Macau Journal of Global Legal Studies, Volume 2 (2025)