ANNOTATED TEXT OF CISG
Article 58

(2) If the contract involves carriage of the goods, the seller may dispatch the goods on terms whereby the goods, or documents controlling their disposition, will not be handed over to the buyer except against payment of the price.

(3) The buyer is not bound to pay the price until he has had an opportunity to examine the goods, unless the procedures for delivery or payment agreed upon by the parties are inconsistent with his having such an opportunity.

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
  
• Editorial 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 58
  • Editorial remarks: John Felemegas [Australia]
  • 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 58 at the 1980 Vienna Diplomatic Conference
• Summary of UNCITRAL legislative history
• Hague Convention antecedents
  • Article 58 match-up with ULIS
  • ULIS (full-text) and André Tunc Commentary on ULIS
  • See also the Report of the Special U.S. Committee, dated 1 December 1964,
    explaining why the United States elected not to adopt either ULIS or ULF

• CASES INVOLVING CISG ARTICLE 58
  • Computer list of annotated cases

• For a companion report on CISG case law and other material, go to Unilex: click for description of and link to this excellent service

• See also:
  • UNCITRAL digest

  • UNCITRAL digest + added cases

• Selected monographs and anthologies (English language)
• Comments on Article 58 from seminal 1986 text by Peter Schlechtriem [Germany]
• Comments on Article 58 from monograph by Jacob S. Ziegel [Canada]

• Comments on Article 58 by Dietrich Maskow [Germany] in 1987 Bianca-Bonell Commentary on the International Sales Law
• Comments on Article 58 by John O. Honnold [U.S.] in the 3rd ed. (1999) of the most frequently cited text on the CISG: Uniform Law for International Sales
• Comments on Article 58 in December 2000 text by Joseph Lookofsky [Denmark / U.S.]
• See also the helpful Enderlein & Maskow text (cited below under the words and phrases section of this Annotated Text material)

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

• Martin Davies, Documents that Satisfy the Requirements of CISG Art. 58, [papers from Uniform Sales Law: the CISG at its 30th Anniversary, a conference in memory of Albert H. Kritzer, 12-13 November 2010, Belgrade] The Annals of the Faculty of Law in Belgrade - Belgrade Law Review, Year LIX (2011) no. 3 pp. 39-66

• Henry D. Gabriel [United States], The Buyer's Performance Under the CISG: Articles 53-60 Trends in the Decisions CISG, 25 Journal of Law and Commerce (2005-2006) 273-283

• Leif Sevón [Finland], Obligations of the Buyer under the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, in Sarcevic & Volken ed., International Sale of Goods: Dubrovnik Lectures, Oceana (1986), Ch. 6 at 214 et seq.; see also Lief Sevón, excerpt from Obligations of the Buyer under the Vienna Convention on the International Sale of Goods, Suomalainen Lakimiesten Yhdistys: - Tidskrift utgiven av Juridiska Föreningen i Finland 126 (1990) 327-343

• Supplementary list of citations to Article 58 commentaries: Unilex citations*

  * Most members of the Autonomous Network of CISG Websites also offer bibliographies. Many are tailored, concentrating on commentaries by authors from or writing on CISG issues of special interest to specific countries or regions; some, e.g. CISG online are general and extensive; some, e.g., CISG-Belgium and CISG-Finland also list commentaries by individual articles of the CISG.

• To identify other relevant commentaries, go to the cisgw3 Bibliography and Bibliography Search Form [payment is a search form entry you may wish to consider]

  Bibliography citations on payment

  We also encourage you to tailor your own cisgw3 bibliography search to the specific aspect of this article that you are researching.*

  * The cisgw3 bibliography contains over 500 pages of citations. Analyzing these listings can pay dividends.

Links to related articles

Attention to related articles and to the CISG in its entirety is important. This is an autonomous law, i.e., it is meant to be construed within its four corners. When considering aspects of the CISG, because this law relies heavily on general principles, one ought to look at related provisions and the CISG in its entirety.

• Article 58 [Time for payment; inspection of the goods] is contained in the section entitled Payment of the price. This section has six articles. For the other five articles, go to Annotated Text of Article 54 [Enabling steps]; go to Annotated Text of Article 55 [Open-price contracts]; go to Annotated Text of Article 56 [Net weight]; go to Annotated Text of Article 57 [Place for payment]; go to Annotated Text of Article 59 [Payment due without request]

Words, phrases and concepts

• The Enderlein & Maskow text is a good place to commence words and phrases research. Click for their analysis of words, phrases and concepts in this article.

  See also:

• 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

For a Doctoral thesis on "Reasonableness" in International Commercial Law, go to Guillaume Weiszberg, Le "Raisonnable" en Droit du Commerce International [pour le doctorat en droit de l’Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II), 7 novembre 2003]