1 § 1: Introduction

1

Drafters of unified contract laws often deliberately exclude questions of property, ownership, or title from the scope of application. Article 8 of the Uniform Law on International Sales (ULIS) and Article 4, sentence 2(b) of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) exemplify this exclusion. This should not, however, be mistaken to mean that a smooth delimitation of property law and unified sales law has thereby been established. The law governing the property in goods has seen no notable acts of international harmonization.1 There are thus myriad notions of rights, liabilities, terms, and concepts from various legal systems that need to be considered when analyzing the interplay between unified sales contract law like the CISG with property in goods.

2

Rabel discovered a remaining relevance of property in the realm of uniform sales law in his ground-breaking work “Das Recht des Warenkaufs” nearly a century ago. He found the concept of property to be partly overestimated and partly underestimated regarding unified sales law, and set out to analyze the practically important facets at the end of the work.2 Accordingly, the table of contents of Volume 1 contains an announcement for a “VIII. Teil. Sicherungen des Verkäufers”3 in Volume 2.4 Volume 2 does not deliver on this promise. In the preface to volume 2, Dölle explained this to be due to the rudimentary state in which the manuscript of this part was when Rabel died before the publication of the second volume.5 Honnold also was aware 2 of the problem with regard to the “complex, conclusionary legal idiom of ‘property’” in uniform sales law and detected the potential for confusion therein, which “at crucial parts need[ed] reexamination.”6

3

Nevertheless, the interplay and tensions between property in goods and the CISG have not yet been comprehensively analyzed. This study endeavors to fill that void.