Measuring Damages Under the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods (hereinafter Convention or CISG)I went into force on January 1, 19882 with the United States as one of nineteen countries that ratified the Convention. 3 The Convention received the requisite two-thirds advice and consent from the Senate and was subsequently ratified by President Reagan.4 Therefore, under the supremacy clause of the United States Constitution, 5 the Convention now prevails over state sales laws, such as the Uniform Commercial Code ("U.C.C."), in international transactions to which the Convention applies.6 Because the Convention eliminates state competence to deal with these sales, 7 it represents a significant displacement of state law in the United States.8 In the wake of American ratification of the Convention, American sales lawyers must consider the Convention's impact on their international sales contracts.Parties can no longer draft international sales contracts in the limited context of conflicts of law provisions and foreign sales law.Contracting parties from different countries that have adopted the Convention 9 must now consider the prospect, benign to some and worrisome to others, that the Convention may control their contract.'0 This Note focuses on one important aspect of the Convention: how the Convention measures money damages.After briefly reviewing the drafting history of the Convention, the scope of its application, and general drafting considerations, the Note will compare the Convention's damages provisions to those of Article 2 of the I. United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, U.N. Doc.AICONF..97/18,Annex 1 (1980) [hereinafter Convention or CISG],

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 367 citations exist upstream.