Precontractual disclosure duties under the Common European Sales Law

This article forms part of a special edition of the Common Market Law Review.

Publishers Abstract:
In the first part of this paper, the author examines how Article 23 works within the framework of commercial law generally and the Common European Sales Law and commercial law more generally. In many other contexts, people are reluctant to impose disclosure duties because they distort the parties' incentives to gather information in the first place. The second part of the paper looks at what effects, if any, disclosing the main characteristics of a product has on the seller's behaviour.

It is also commonly asserted that disclosure duties are, by their nature, inherently hard to implement. Requiring a party to disclose a particular piece of information in a fashion that ensures that it is understood (and does not make communication of other information harder) has proved difficult in many environments. The third part of the paper asks if Article 23's disclosure requirements present such difficulties.