Common Features of Uniform Commercial Law Conventions. A Comparative Study Beyond the 1980 Uniform Sales Law

Taking the 1980 U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) as a starting point, 'Common Features of Uniform Commercial Law Conventions' compares a number of salient features of most recent international uniform law Conventions in the field of commercial contracts (e.g., agency, leasing, factoring, independent guarantees, assignment of receivables, security interests in mobile equipment). The comparative approach is aimed at investigating whether the increasing number of Conventions is at all leading to a coherent set of uniform instruments, and thus to a coherent legal framework for international business transactions. The main purpose of the analysis is to support resorting to inter-conventional interpretation as a methodology enhancing the autonomous interpretation of uniform law instruments. Any effort towards the creation of a new piece of uniform legislation endows the drafters with the challenging responsibility to implicitly foster or defeat certain given solutions adopted in previous Conventions, in the light of their concrete operation and the possibly new needs raised by business operators. To this extent, those engaged in the creation of uniform instruments may be required to attribute a pivotal role to solutions that they may not consider to be the best possible, but still consider suitable to be reproduced in subsequent texts. Indeed, provided that uniform law subjects an international transaction to a single set of rules, thus reducing the costs associated with the identification of the law governing the transaction, one should also consider the risk that new uniform rules bring uncertainty in what the legal rules require. Hence, one way to reduce the impact of such risks with regard to new uniform law Conventions is to transplant therein concepts and solutions already adopted in previous Conventions, and thus familiar to business operators.