"The Civil Codes and Common Law Jurisdiction compared; Good Faith and Force Majeure"

10 November 2006

Jeremy Glover, in a paper given at the IBA Construction Conference, Construction Projects From Conception to Completion, held in Brussels, discusses the different approaches to the concepts of good faith and force majeure to be found under Common Law Jurisdictions and under the Civil Codes. This highlights one of the potential difficulties with international projects, namely that contracts are entered into or governed by laws which may be unfamiliar to one or other of the contracting parties. Therefore, it is important that assumptions are not made as to what particular clauses mean and as to which legal principles can be implied into a particular contract.