The Draft UNCITRAL Digest and Beyond

Book excerpt: The Draft UNCITRAL Digest and Beyond: Cases, Analysis and Unresolved Issues in the U.N. Sales Convention, will be one of the most useful single volumes available on the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). It will include the full text of the draft UNCITRAL Digest which catalogues the cases and arbitral awards to date that have interpreted and applied the CISG on an article by article basis. The Digest and Beyond, it will also include commentary by eminent CISG scholars that addresses issues not yet considered in the cases. With more than 1,000 decisions applying the CISG in courts and arbitral tribunals around the world, the UNCITRAL Secretariat charged five CISG experts from a variety of regions with the task of creating a digest of CISG case law. The five experts chosen to prepare case reviews for the UNCITRAL Digest, and the CISG articles their portions of the Digest will cover, are: Franco Ferrari, Verona University, Italy (Articles 1-13, 78) Peter Winship, Southern Methodist University (Articles 14-24, 66-77) Ulrich Magnus, University of Hamburg, Germany (Articles 25-34, 45-52) Harry Flechtner, University of Pittsburgh (Articles 35-44, 79-88) Claude Witz, University of the Saarland, Germany (Articles 53-65) The appearance of the UNCITRAL Digest (likely to occur sometime in 2004) is expected to revolutionize the understanding and practice of international sales law. It will, however, only catalogue the existing cases and their interpretations of the CISG. It will not contain critical analysis of the decisions, or coverage of important issues not yet covered in the reported decisions. The Draft UNCITRAL Digest and Beyond: Cases, Analysis and Unresolved Issues in the U.N. Sales Convention will be availble in Oktober 2003, and will include the draft UNCITRAL Digest, even before it is released officially by UNCITRAL. It will also go where the authors of the Digest were not allowed to go, given the narrow mandate within which the drafters were asked to work. Its chapters will build upon the work of the UNCITRAL Digest. The Digest describes the reasoning and results of existing CISG cases; in The Digest and Beyond, the Digest authors will analyze those cases, and discuss issues that have not yet arisen in the case law. Thus, in many ways, The Digest and Beyond will provide scholarship that can direct future cases in areas that have not yet been considered by courts and arbitrators as well as in areas in which contradictory court decisions exist. Each chapter by a Digest author will be followed by commentary written by two other distinguished CISG scholars on important topics dealt with in that part of the Digest. These commentary authors round out a who¿s who of CISG experts from around the world. They are: Joseph Lookofsky, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Michael Bridge, University College, London, UK Maria del Pilar Perales Viscasillas, Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain Johan Erauw, University of Ghent, Belgium Henry Gabriel, Loyala University, New Orleans Alejandro Garro, Columbia University Paul Volken, University of Fribourg, Switzerland Ronald A. Brand, University of Pittsburgh Filip De Ly, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands Petar ¿arcevic, University of Rijeka, Croatia John E. Murray, Jr., Chancellor, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh We further anticipate that an introduction will be written by Jernej Sekolec, Secretary of UNCITRAL, and a concluding chapter by Harold Burman of the Office of Private International Law of the U.S. Department of State.