Good Faith in Contract

Book excerpt: In many legal systems around the world, whether civilian or common law, the doctrine of good faith is recognised as one of the general principles of contract law. By contrast, English law has taken a different approach, relying on a number of specific doctrines aimed at securing fair dealing but eschewing any general principle of good faith in contract. In the light of recent good faith provisions - such as those found in the EC Directives on Commercial Agents and on Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts, as well as in the Lando Commission's 'Principles of European Contract Law' and the UNIDROIT 'Principles of International Commercial Contracts' - it is open to debate whether the English law of contract can, or indeed should, maintain its traditional approach.The purpose of the essays in this collection is to inform such a debate in two principal ways: first, by drawing out the competing conceptions (and concomitant credentials) of the idea of good faith in contract; and, secondly, by exploring the role of good faith in different contexts - for example, in the context of both consumer and commercial contracting, but also in the context of specific fields of contract law (such as insurance and financial services), particular patterns of doctrinal response to bad faith and unfair dealing and the various traditions of legal reasoning found around the world.The essays represent a significant international engagement with a question that is by no means of interest only to English lawyers. For, the perspectives presented by the European, Nordic, Israeli, North American, South African and Australian contributors to this book serve to illuminate our understanding of the idea of good faith whether our concern is with our own local legal system or, beyond that, with the elaboration of principles of contract law for regional or global application.