ANNOTATED TEXT OF CISG
Article 31

(a) if the contract of sale involves carriage of the goods - in handing the goods over to the first carrier for transmission to the buyer;

(b) if, in cases not within the preceding subparagraph, the contract relates to specific goods, or unidentified goods to be drawn from a specific stock or to be manufactured or produced, and at the time of the conclusion of the contract the parties knew that the goods were at, or were to be manufactured or produced at, a particular place - in placing the goods at the buyer's disposal at that place;

(c) in other cases - in placing the goods at the buyer's disposal at the place where the seller had his place of business at the time of the conclusion of the contract.

Legislative history || Case law || Scholarly writings || Links to related articles || Words and phrases || CISG (full-text)

Guide to this article

• UNCITRAL outline of issues present
  
• Editoral analysis of this article with cross-references to related subjects [not yet available]
  
• Secretariat Commentary (closest counterpart to an Official Commentary on this article)
• Match-up of this article with the 1978 draft
(to validate Secretariat Commentary)
• Use of the Principles of European Contract Law to help interpret CISG article 31
  • Match-ups with Continental and Common Law domestic rules, doctrine and jurisprudence

• Roadmap to the legislative history of this article
• Legislative history of this article: long form
• Legislative history of this article: short form
  • Chronology of development of Article 31 at the 1980 Vienna Diplomatic Conference
• Summary of UNCITRAL legislative history
• Hague Convention antecedents
  • Article 31 match-up with ULIS
  • ULIS (full-text) and André Tunc Commentary on ULIS

• • Michael Joachim Bonell & Fabio Liguori [Italy], excerpt from The UN Convention on the International Sale of Goods: A Critical Analysis of Current International Case Law - 1997 (Part 1), Uniform Law Review (1997) 385-395

  • Martin Karollus [Austria], excerpt from Judicial Interpretation and Application of the CISG in Germany 1988-1994, Cornell Review of the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (1995) 51-94

• For further information on CISG case law (material not in this database), go to Unilex: click for a description of the contents of this service. Also of considerable utility are the compendium of case citations and the CISG bibliography contained in Michael R. Will, Twenty Years of International Sales Law Under the CISG: International Bibliography and Case Law Digest, Kluwer Law International (2000). Prof. Will's materials are presented on the CD-Rom edition of the database.

• Selected monographs and anthologies (English language)

• Comments on Article 31 from 1999 text by John O. Honnold [U.S.] [available in CD-ROM edition only]

• Comments on Article 31 from seminal 1986 text by Peter Schlechtriem [Germany]

• Comments on Article 31 from monograph by Jacob S. Ziegel [Canada]

• Citations to materials on this article in other texts (selected texts only)
• Selected law journal articles and other commentaries

• Henry D. Gabriel [U.S.], The International Chamber of Commerce INCOTERMS 1990: A Guide to the Terms and Their Usage, 3 Vindobona Journal of International Law and Arbitration, Issue 1 (1999) 61-70

• Burghard Piltz [Germany], INCOTERMS and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, in: Pace ed., Review of the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) 1998, Kluwer Law International (1999) 41-51

• Roadmap to Incoterms (1990), Albert H. Kritzer ed., prepared with the help of Jack Scally, former President of the National Shippers Council

• To identify other relevant commentaries, go to Bibliography and Bibliography Search Form [deliver* (stem for delivery/deliveries) is a search form entry you may wish to consider; to compare the CISG's delivery terms with the trade terms most commonly adopted, you may also wish to enter incoterms in the bibliography search form]

  Our bibliography contains thousands of citations in 24 languages; we encourage you to tailor your own bibliography search to the specific aspect of this article that you are researching.

Links to related articles

• Article 31 [Place for delivery] is part of the section entitled, Delivery of the goods and handing over of documents. This section contains four articles. For links to the other three articles; go to Annotated Text of Article 32 [Shipping arrangements]; go to Annotated Text of Article 33 [Time for delivery]; go to Annotated Text of Article 34 [Documents relating to the goods]

• See also the Convention's provisions on Passing of risk. Links to this material are to be found with the Annotated Texts of Articles 66 through 70

Words, phrases and concepts

• State of knowledge ("knew") [31(b)]; link to same language and to variations on this theme recited elsewhere in the CISG

• reasonableness: Although not specifically mentioned in this article, reasonableness is a general principle of the CISG
  • For the definition of reasonableness recited in the Principles of European Contract Law and references to reasonableness in Continental and Common Law domestic rules, doctrine and jurisprudence, go to PECL article 1:302 and the comment and notes prepared for this provision

  • To drive home the correlation between the PECL's definition of reasonableness and the evident same meaning of this term to CISG legislators when they used the concept either specifically or as a general principle of the uniform law they drafted, see overview comments and comments that illustrate the similar manner in which this concept fits the CISG