PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This book deals with the law and practice of international sale of goods contracts before English courts and arbitrators. It assumes that English law is the applicable law of the contract. The reported cases are almost invariably about contracts concluded on standard forms selecting English law as the applicable law. For that reason, questions of choice of law receive only a passing mention. The reader is referred to standard texts dealing with the conflict of laws.

A prominent feature of English law in its application to international sales is that the reported cases almost always arise out of commodity sales transactions, no part of whose performance occurs in England and which usually concern parties who have no visible connection with England. The quantities involved have in recent decades increased to a great extent as the traffic in commodities across the North Atlantic has become concentrated more and more in ever larger bulk carriers, designed to take advantage of the economies of doing business in this way. A small number of north European ports, where large bulks are broken for further destinations, are large enough to deal with these carriers. The effect of these developments on the law has been felt principally in two areas. First, the practice of bulk shipments delayed the passing of property to individual end buyers so that it took place after payment was made. This meant that end buyers might not be able to sue the carrier for breach of the contract of carriage pursuant to the Bills of Lading Act 1855. It also meant, by subverting the security that normally comes with cash on delivery transactions, that end buyers were at risk of the insolvency of their sellers (or even of sellers further up the sales string). The statutory responses to these difficulties were, respectively, the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1992 and the Sale of Goods (Amendment) Act 1995. Secondly, a large number of the most recent cases have thrown up problems arising out of the intersection of a voyage charter party contract, whether entered into by the FOB buyer or the CIF seller, with the contract of sale of goods. Sale and charter party contracts have become increasingly intertwined.