Book Review: Commercial Contract Law: Transatlantic Perspectives
| Published date | 01 March 2014 |
| Author | Caroline Cauffman |
| DOI | 10.1177/1023263X1402100112 |
| Date | 01 March 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review |
21 MJ 1 (2014) 221
BOOK REVIEW
L.A. DiMatteo, Q. Zhou, S. Saintier and K. Rowley (eds.), Commercial Contract Law:
Transatlantic Perspectives, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 618 p.,
hardback, £68, ISBN 978 –1–10702–808–1
e book Commercial Contract Law: Transatlantic Perspectives is the product of a
symposium held in September 2011 to honour the lifetime achievements of Professor
Bradgate.
e book aims to provide a comparat ive overview of the cur rent debates and trends
in the eld of commercial contract law in the UK and the US. It contains 21 chapters
by British and American scholars centred around seven themes: 1. e role of consent;
2. Normative views of contract; 3. Contract design and good faith; 4. Implied terms
and interpretation; 5. Policing contracting behaviour; 6. Misrepresentation, breach and
remedies; and 7. Harmonizing contrac t law.
e contribut ions use a wide variety of approaches to shed light on the t hemes of the
book, such as doctri nal analysis, analy sis of law and economics, and socio-legal studies.
e editors bring all the contributions together in the rst chapter, which sets out
the aim of the book, and also lists the main di erences between UK and US law. A
primary and i mportant di erence is the fact t hat the US is a party to the United Nations
Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG), whereas the UK
is not. Further di erences follow from the implementation in the UK of EU directives,
and of federal and state legislat ion in the US which pre-empt the operation of common
law. e duty of good faith and the doctrine of unconscionability are mentioned as the
most important sources of di erences at the level of the meta-principles. e editors’
suggestion that these di erences may be more a matter of evolutionary lag than of
permanent schism seems to have been con rmed in the meantime by the High Cou rt’s
decision in Yam Seng PTE Ltd v. International Trade Corporation Ltd. In this case Judge
Leggatt stated that the traditional English hostility towards a duty of good faith in the
performance of contracts, to t he extent that it still exists, is m isplaced. In his view,
there seems (…) to be no di cu lty, following the established me thodology of English law for
the implication of ter ms in fact, in implyi ng such a duty in any ordinar y commercial contract
based on the presume d intention of the parties.1
1 [2013] EWHC 111 (QB) at 119–154.
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