ABSTRACT
In Civil Law jurisdictions a duty of good faith applies to the performance of contractual obligations. The proposed Common European Sales Law provided, at Article 2 that “good faith and fair dealing was a standard of conduct characterised by honesty, openness and consideration for the interests of the other party to the transaction or relationship in question”. There is a third way to bring concepts of cooperation in modern complex contracts into play in English Contract Law. It is neither necessary to rewrite the law and principles entirely, as relational theorists require, nor to undermine the commercial strengths of the Common Law, which minimalists and formalists assume would be the result. Survey respondents consider that cooperation goes further than “coordination and planning”, which one might call mechanical or techno-cooperation. In relational contract literature cooperation represents a basic real-world dynamic and is a major component of norms such as preservation of the relationship or solidarity.
