Pitt Law’s Journal of Law and Commerce to Publish United Nations Treaty Digest

PITTSBURGH—A special issue of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law Journal of Law and Commerce will publish the 2012 United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Digest of Case Law on the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The Journal is one of the world’s premier sources of scholarship on the U.N.  convention, in large part because of the work of Pitt Professor of Law Harry M. Flechtner.

Flechtner is at the forefront of scholarship on the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. He led the five-member team of legal scholars from across the globe that compiled both the 2008 and 2012 CISG Digest of Case Law. He also is one of the two U.S. national correspondents on the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law and was one of five scholars worldwide who created the original Digest in 2004.

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods is a global treaty on international sales contracts to which the United States and more than 75 other countries are parties. It has been described as the single most successful attempt to bring international uniformity to commercial law. 

“The Digest of Case Law on the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods is a vital resource for research on the convention,” says Ronald A. Brand, Pitt’s Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg Chair, professor of law, and the founding director of Pitt’s Center for International Legal Education. “The Digest provides a narrative guide to issues that have arisen under the convention and how courts and arbitration panels around the world have treated those issues. Thus, it greatly facilitates access to the vast body of global decisions interpreting the convention and advances the fundamental policy—as expressed in Article 7 of the convention—of promoting uniformity in the application of the international commercial treaty.”

Pitt’s Center for International Legal Education, with financial support from Brand’s Nordenberg Chair, is partnering with Die Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)—a German technical cooperation organization with offices in 87 countries, including the Balkans—to distribute the Digest in both the United States and Europe. Every U.S. federal judge, as well as Journal of Law and Commerce subscribers and interested legal academics, will receive a copy. The Digest also will be distributed to the more than 280 law faculties from 80-plus countries who will participate in the 2013 Willem C. Vis International Arbitration Moot in Vienna, Austria, and in the pre-Moot in Belgrade, Serbia. The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law has made the Digest available online at www.uncitral.org/pdf/english/clout/CISG-digest-2012-e.pdf.

Additional information on the publication of the Digest is available by contacting Brand at 412-648-1307 or rbrand@pitt.edu. 

About the Center for International Legal Education

Pitt’s Center for International Legal Education provides a global approach to legal education, serving American and foreign students, Pitt Law alumni, and the Pittsburgh region’s legal community through programs, scholarships, internships, study abroad, and other opportunities. 

The Center and GIZ have partnered in the Balkans by supporting teams from law faculties in the region in their preparation and participation in the Willem C. Vis International Arbitration Moot that is held annually in Vienna, Austria.

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11/19/12/mab