| Summary: | The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (‘CISG’) is one of the most widely accepted and important international private law agreements. It attempts to eliminate written formalities for contracting under it ‘freedom of form’ provisions, yet it simultaneously allows signatory states to take a reservation, and declare that they do not accept the provisions of the CISG which eliminate these formalities. This leaves open a doctrinal puzzle: how should courts rule when there is a dispute over the existence of a valid contract, there has not been an effective choice of law, and one party is from a declaring state? While most courts have approached this problem through the methodology of private international law, this thesis proposes that the better reading of the CISG will ordinarily favour applying the reservation and using the formalities rules of the reserving state.
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