ABSTRACT
Over the past forty years, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) has indisputably proven its success in creating a uniform substantive law for international sales. The quite liberal principles that the CISG adopts have significantly contributed to its rising level of worldwide acceptance. The principle of freedom of form is one of those governing principles. Article 11 CISG incorporates this principle as it liberates the CISG contracts from all domestic form requirements envisaged both for validity and evidentiary purposes. On the other hand, as the legislative history of the Convention demonstrates, the issue of formal validity had been highly controversial. Thus, as a compromise, Articles 12 and 96 CISG were incorporated into the Convention to provide Contracting States with a possibility of reservation with the legal effect of excluding the freedom-of-form principle within a limited scope. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how Article 96 CISG-Reservations undermine the CISG’s paramount aim of legal uniformity by generating divergent views with respect to the determination of the law governing the formal validity of the contract and how Article 13 CISG can be used to cure this problem.
