ANNOTATED TEXT OF CISG
Article 73

(2) If one party's failure to perform any of his obligations in respect of any instalment gives the other party good grounds to conclude that a fundamental breach of contract will occur with respect to future instalments, he may declare the contract avoided for the future, provided that he does so within a reasonable time.

(3) A buyer who declares the contract avoided in respect of any delivery may, at the same time, declare it avoided in respect of deliveries already made or of future deliveries if, by reason of their interdependence, those deliveries could not be used for the purpose contemplated by the parties 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 73
  • 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 73 at the 1980 Vienna Diplomatic Conference
• Summary of UNCITRAL legislative history
• Hague Convention antecedent
  • Article 73 match-up with ULIS
  • ULIS (full-text) and André Tunc Commentary on ULIS

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

• Comments on Article 73 from seminal 1986 text by Peter Schlechtriem [Germany]
• Comments on Article 73 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 [anticipatory breach ("pre/1" = instruction used to confine search to commentary titles with "anticipatory" and "breach" presented together), avoid* (stem for avoidance), cancel* (stem for cancellation/cancelation), fundamental breach, instal* (stem for installment/instalment) and remed* (stem for 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

• Article 73 [Avoidance in installment contracts] is part of the section entitled Anticipatory breach and instalment contracts. This section contains three articles. For links to the other two articles, go to Annotated Text of Article 71 [Suspension of performance]; go to Annotated Text of Article 72 [Avoidance prior to the date for performance]

• Go also to Annotated Text of Article 51 [Non-conformity of part of the goods] ("Article 73(1) . . . permit[s] a party to treat each installment of an installment contract as a severable contract for purposes of avoidance . . . Article 73(1), therefore, is analogous to Article 51(1) -- the provision which permits the buyer to sever, for remedy purposes, the portion of a contract relating to a missing or non-conforming part of a single delivery." Flechtner, "Remedies Under the Convention", 8 Journal of Law and Commerce (1988) 88-89.)

• For a collection of links on avoidance; go to Annotated Text of Article 25 [Definition of "fundamental breach"]

Words, phrases and concepts

• reasonableness [73(2)]: 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