Unification of Commercial Contract Law: The Role of the Dominant Economy

This paper is about the unification of commercial contract law. Showing that the legal rules preferred by the »dominant economy« frequently end up in uniform commercial contract laws does not show that those legal rules are inherently superior to any other legal rules. It will be argued that approval of a uniform commercial contract law by the »dominant economy« is the environmental factor that is crucial to its ultimate success, independent of the innate quality of the legal rules preferred by the »dominant economy«. Within the conceptual framework of historical and comparative institutional analysis (HCIA), a study is offered of several well-known attempts to unify (and codify) divergent bodies of commercial contract law in the past two centuries. The argument is not so much that the American UCC Article 2 on Sales greatly influenced the CISG as that United States adoption of the CISG was crucial to its ultimate success, independent of the innate quality of the legal rules preferred by the United States.