ANNOTATED TEXT OF CISG
Article 51

(2) The buyer may declare the contract avoided in its entirety only if the failure to make delivery completely or in conformity with the contract amounts to a fundamental breach 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 51
  • 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 51 at the 1980 Vienna Diplomatic Conference
• Summary of UNCITRAL legislative history
• Hague Convention antecedent
  • Article 51 match-up with ULIS
  • ULIS (full-text) and André Tunc Commentary on ULIS

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

• Comments on Article 51 from seminal 1986 text by Peter Schlechtriem [Germany]

• Comments on Article 51 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

• Harry M. Flechtner [U.S.], excerpt from Remedies Under the New International Sales Convention: The Perspective from Article 2 of the U.C.C., 8 Journal of Law and Commerce (1988) 53-108

• To identify other relevant commentaries, go to Bibliography and Bibliography Search Form [instal* (stem for installment/instalment) and remed* (stem for remedy/remedies) 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

• Go to Annotated Text of Article 73 [Avoidance in installment contracts]

• For the provisions cited in Article 51(1) [Non-conformity of part of the goods], go to Annotated Text of Article 46 [Buyer's right to compel performance]; go to Annotated Text of Article 47 [Buyer's notice fixing additional final period for performance]; go to Annotated Text of Article 48 [Cure after date for delivery; request for clarification]; go to Annotated Text of Article 49 [Buyer's right to avoid]; go to Annotated Text of Article 50 [Buyer's right to reduce price]

Words, phrases and concepts

• 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