ANNOTATED TEXT OF CISG
Article 38

(2) If the contract involves carriage of the goods, examination may be deferred until after the goods have arrived at their destination.

(3) If the goods are redirected in transit or redispatched by the buyer without a reasonable opportunity for examination by him and at the time of the conclusion of the contract the seller knew or ought to have known of the possibility of such redirection or redispatch, examination may be deferred until after the goods have arrived at the new destination.

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)

• 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 38 at the 1980 Vienna Diplomatic Conference
  • North-South tensions over Arts. 38/39: development of compromise Art. 44 "safety net"
• Summary of UNCITRAL legislative history
• Hague Convention antecedent
  • Article 38 match-up with ULIS
  • ULIS (full-text) and André Tunc Commentary on ULIS

• For a report on case law and doctrine published in Fall 2000 and for an earlier report on case law from Germany, go to:

  • Claude Witz [France], A Raw Nerve in Disputes relating to the Vienna Sales Convention: The Reasonable time for the Buyer to Give Notice of a Lack of Conformity, ICC International Court of Arbitration Bulletin, Vol. 11/No. 2 (2000) 15-21

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

• Comments on Article 38 from seminal 1986 text by Peter Schlechtriem [Germany]
• Comments on Article 38 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

• Peter Schlechtriem [Germany], Beginn und Dauer der Untersuchungs- und Rügefrist beim grenzüberschreitenden Kauf [Beginning and duration of the inspection period in international sales (under the CISG) - in German], Entscheidungen zum Wirtschaftsrecht (2000) 125-156

• Go to Annotated Text of Article 39 [Notice of lack of conformity] for links to other journal commentaries that also address Article 38

• To identify relevant commentaries, go to Bibliography and Bibliography Search Form [examin* (stem for examination) and notice are search form entries you may wish to consider]

  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

• As Article 38 [Time for examining the goods] will generally be read with Article 39, go to Annotated Text of Article 39 [Notice of lack of conformity]

Words, phrases and concepts

• State of knowledge ("ought to have known") [38(3)]: link to same language and to variations on this theme recited elsewhere in the CISG

• "redirected in transit" (38(3)). A colloquy at the Diplomatic Conference explains this phrase. OR 318-320, paras. 1-30 [OR = Official Records of the United Nations Conference on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, Vienna 10 March - 11 April 1980, A/CONF. 97/19]

• reasonableness [38(3)]: In addition to being 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