Ebook: Comparative Commercial Contracts: Law, Culture and Economic Development

Part I. Overview, methodology, formation and evolution of commercial promises -- 1. Guiding themes and content of this book -- 2. Methodology -- 3. The law of contracts in a pre-commercial or agricultural survival society -- 4. Roman law -- Part II. Medieval law: guilds, agents and notaries -- 5. Medieval law -- 6. Guilds and the capitalist system and Marxist legal systems -- 7. The Latin notariat and contemporary contracts -- Part III. European codification -- 8. The French 'code civil'; key politics and drafting method -- 9. The birth of a continental European commercial law; fair and commercial courts -- 10. The 'code de commerce' of 1808 -- 11. Socio-economic context of Germany's civil and commercial codes -- 12. The codification of the German civil and commercial codes -- 13. Customs, usages and other sources of commercial contract law in German and other representative codes -- Part IV. Familistic and socialist variants of the civil law -- 14. Latin American codification and its all-important colonial background -- 15. Soviet commercial contract law -- 16. The peculiar meaning of Soviet and post-Soviet commercial contracts: an invertebrate legal system -- 17. Chinese imperial, mostly living-law of contracts -- 18. Contracts and litigation in imperial and Mao's China -- 19. Contemporary land contracts, third parties and judicial law making -- Part V. Anglo-American law -- 20. Socio-economic and legal contexts and English commercial contracts -- 21. The socio-economic and legal contexts of U.S. commercial contracts -- Part VI. Formation, interpretation and adjudication of contractual and customary law disputes -- 22. Formation of contracts: ceremony or conduct? -- 23. Two guiding principles for the interpretation of commercial contracts: good faith and reasonableness -- 24. Drafting commercial practices and the growth of commercial contract law -- 25. Brief overview of commercial trial procedure -- 26. Pre-contractual liability: culpa in contrahendo -- 27. Excuses for non-performance of contracts -- 28. Extrajudicial remedies and the remedy of specific performance -- 29. Judicial and extrajudicial termination -- 30. Damages for breach of warranty in U.S. economic analysis influenced law.;"This work offers a contextual comparative analysis of commercial contracts from their origin until the present time. It studies their positive and living law in countries and regions representative of major legal systems and business cultures: Classical Rome, Medieval Europe and Middle East, Codification Europe (especially France and Germany), Post-Colonial Latin America, the Soviet Union, the Peoples' Republic of China, England, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Post-Colonial United States. It identifies the concepts, principles, rules, doctrines, methods of reasoning and commercial practices that have contributed most to mankind's economic development."--Publisher.