CISG Legal Research Services
CISG Today
As of October 8, 2023 the CISG has been adopted by 97 nations, including nine out of the ten largest trading nations in the world. As the primary law for international sales contract, the CISG is potentially applicable for 70-80% of the world’s trade in goods today. Even though, some large corporations, for various reasons, still insist on explicitly excluding the CISG in contracting, it is crucial to note that the CISG has been taken into a high level of consideration that it is sometimes invoked as a source of transnational law beyond its scope of application. That means the CISG could have effects on an international sales contract whether or not its application has been explicitly or implicitly excluded.
As a United Nations “diplomatic” document that tries to compromise among social, economic, and political cultures, the CISG has never claimed itself to become a complete statement of law regarding international sale of goods. It inevitably has gaps, being those matters governed by the Convention but are not expressly settled in it. Such gaps are to be filled “in conformity with the general principles on which the Convention is based”. The discovery and application of these general principles are problematical. Some general principles, such as party autonomy, good faith, and reasonableness, have been discovered and applied; whereas others still need to be deduced from specific CISG provisions and elaborated by case law and legal scholars. Several lists of the general principles of the CISG have been drawn up by legal scholars, but they are not entirely corresponding with each other. Nevertheless, global application of the CISG is now a clear tendency.