151 § 5: Property and the claim for the purchase price

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Paramount for a seller is the buyer’s obligation to pay the purchase price and the seller’s means to enforce it against an unwilling counterparty. Unlike the enforcement of the obligation to deliver the goods, which has taken center stage in comparative law projects for decades, the existence, scope, and enforcement of the obligation to pay the price has remained largely backstage.692 Yet, enforcing performance of the monetary obligation, i.e., claiming the purchase price, is much more common in practice than the enforcement of the obligation to deliver.

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Since a court judgment in favor of the seller will be expressed in terms of a claim for money, and enforcement will thus pose no more problems than the enforcement of damages claims,693 the question is sometimes dismissed as “trivial”,694 “far less problematic”,695 or is completely ignored696. The lack of comparative insight prevents legal certainty for the seller as to whether he or she is allowed to insist on the claim for the price instead of mitigating the loss or damage by, for example, stopping the production of the goods or selling them elsewhere.