ANNOTATED TEXT OF CISG
Article 81

(2) A party who has performed the contract either wholly or in part may claim restitution from the other party of whatever the first party has supplied or paid under the contract. If both parties are bound to make restitution, they must do so concurrently.

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 UNIDROIT Principles to help interpret CISG Article 81 [partial presentation]
• Use of the Principles of European Contract Law to help interpret CISG article 81
  • 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 81 at the 1980 Vienna Diplomatic Conference
• Summary of UNCITRAL legislative history
• Hague Convention antecedent
  • Article 81 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 81 from 1999 text by John O. Honnold [U.S.] [available in CD-ROM edition only]

• Comments on Article 81 from seminal 1986 text by Peter Schlechtriem [Germany]
• Comments on Article 81 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 [avoid* (stem for avoidance), cancel* (stem for cancellation/cancelation), remed* (stem for remedy/remedies) and restitution 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 81 is part of the section entitled, Effects of avoidance. This section contains four articles. For links to the other three articles, go to Annotated Text of Article 82 [Buyer's inability to return goods in same condition]; go to Annotated Text of Article 83 [Preservation of other remedies]; go to Annotated Text of Article 84 [Restitution of benefits]

• A related section is entitled, Preservation of the goods. Links to this material are to be found with the Annotated Texts of Articles 85 through 88.

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

Words, phrases and concepts

• bankruptcy. Colloquy at Diplomatic Conference on possible conflict between Article 81(2) and domestic bankruptcy laws. OR 414, paras. 75-84 [OR = Official Records of the United Nations Conference on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, Vienna 10 March 1980, A/CONF. 97/19]

• 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