The Roots and Fruits of Good Faith in Domestic Court Practice

Abstract

Good faith—most lawyers have an opinion on these two words. While the notion of good faith may play specific roles at domestic and regional levels, it remains an elusive siren at the international level. The concept was subject to controversy at the birth of the 1980 United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) and has been debated by scholars ever since. Considering that the Convention has now been in force for over thirty years, it is agreed that time is ripe for “a call to arms for further research into a uniform standard of good faith. This Article contributes to such further research as it unravels the life of good faith in court practice on a scale never before seen. *PhD, Master of Laws. Associate Professor at Aalborg University. Founder and editor of the CISGNordic.net research database. orcid.org/00000002-0477-7429. The research underlying this Article was sponsored by the Danish Council for Independent Research. This Article is the second in a series of Articles mapping the application practice of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). For the first Article, see Thomas Neumann, Is the Albert Kritzer Database Telling Us More Than We Know?, 27 PACE INT'L L. REV. 119 (2015).