International Contracts

DESCRIPTION

International Contracts will cover Contract Drafting and the International Sales Law.

The objective of the Contract Drafting class is to familiarise students with the art and challenges of drafting agreements in international commerce. Besides presenting the different methods and techniques, the class wants to raise awareness of possible pitfalls in contract drafting. Students will study contract templates containing various clauses that feature typically in international commercial agreements and assess their functions. They will look at disputes that have arisen from ambiguously formulated clauses and analyse how courts have dealt with them. After the class, students should be able to recognise deficient clauses and draft litigation-proof clauses themselves.

The International Sales Law course will examine whether the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (“CISG”), considered the paradigm of uniform substantive law conventions, has succeeded in creating uniform (sales) law that avoids recourse to domestic law. To do so, the course will analyze case law from courts and arbitral tribunals. This analysis will show that the solutions are not as uniform as one might think. This, in turn, will allow course participants to avoid the pitfalls that go hand in hand with the myth of uniformity the success of the CISG has (falsely) created.