Thomas Kadner Graziano, COMPARATIVE CONTRACT LAW: CASES, MATERIALS AND EXERCISES Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (www.palgrave.com), 2010. xvii + 510 pp. ISBN 9780230579798. £34.99.
| Pages | 527-529 |
| Author | Martin Hogg |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2010.0314 |
We are living in the age of comparative law. Contract is being taught to students with the Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR) and Principles of European Contract Law (PECL) in mind, and often by reference to national solutions adopted in France, Germany, the USA, South Africa, and elsewhere. Any judgment of the new Supreme Court raising a question of the development of the common law, or even sometimes the application of legislation, comes with a considered analysis of how the matter in question would be dealt with in other jurisdictions. Frustratingly for scholars, however, finding appropriate and comprehensible comparative source materials can still be a laborious process. The present work will be very useful in assisting with that task.
The work has a number of strengths, and one principal weakness. Its strengths lie in the breadth of jurisdictions chosen for inclusion, in the helpful dual-language legislative and case entries (as well as excerpts from English language academic commentary), and in the scenarios chosen against which to test the comparative materials selected. Its principal weakness lies in the somewhat truncated range of issues dealt with.
As to the breadth of jurisdictions chosen, these include supranational model law such as the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts, the PECL, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, as well as the national systems of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy, Quebec, Louisiana, England, the Common Law states of the USA, China, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania, and others. A pity then, especially given that Louisiana and Quebec were included, that Scotland was not, but one cannot have everything, and such a criticism would be somewhat partisan. It is heartening to see so many jurisdictions included, as it provides a much wider comparative canvas than is usually the case in the standard comparative works (which often choose to focus on the Comparative Law Trinity of France, Germany and England). The author has chosen such a wide bag of countries with a clear purpose in mind, as he explains in his chapter on the comparative methodology he has adopted: it “widens the perspectives and spectrum of possible solutions … and should make it possible to have a discourse of legal issues among lawyers across national borders” (8). This is undoubtedly true, and one can imagine, for instance, a copy of the work being a useful tool at...
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