By Professor John Honnold Published by Kluwer Law and Taxation Publishers, The Netherlands (1982, 468 pp., plus 118 pp. appendices and index) Casebound Dfl. 140 (U.S. $70); paperback Dfl. 80 (U.S. $40)

The creation of a uniform law for international sales has long been a dream of all those involved in international trade, for such a code would largely dispense with costly preliminary negotiations concerning the actual terms of sale, and substantially eliminate even more costly subsequent proceedings to determine the proper law of contract when one of the parties is seeking to renege on his obligations. A further advantage of an international code, as Honnold points out, is that where the proper law is eventually determined as the internal law of one nation it will be intended to regulate domestic agreements and may thus be totally inappropriate to the agreement in question. Professor Honnold’s book is an exhaustive study of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods adopted in 1980, the most comprehensive attempt to date to overcome the problems of international sales outlined above.

Chapter 1 places the 1980 Convention in its historical setting, outlining earlier attempts to produce uniform laws resulting in The Hague Conventions of 1964 which adopted Uniform Laws for the International Sale of Goods (ULIS) and Uniform Laws on the Formation of Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (ULIF). The chapter goes on to trace subsequent United Nations interest in a worldwide extension of The Hague Conventions, which were effectively confined to Europe, and finally the work of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) resulting in the 1978 Draft Conventions. The Convention adopted by the Diplomatic Conference of the United Nations in Vienna in 1980, to all intents and purposes the 1978 Drafts with minor amendments, forms the subject matter of the remainder of the book.