Originally from:
ASA Special Series No. 30: Performance as a Remedy - Hardcover
ASA Special Series No. 30: Performance as a Remedy - Electronic
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Chapter 2
A Comparative Overview on
Performance as a Remedy:
A Key to Divergent Approaches
Christine Chappuis∗
1. INTRODUCTION
Performance is the natural remedy for breach of contract in civil
law systems.1 In common law systems, specific performance is an
exceptional remedy and will only be granted if damages are
inadequate. Such is the general understanding of one of the great rifts
between the two systems. The clash seen as “civil law morality" versus
"common law economic efficiency" bears a slight emotional undertone
summarized by Holmes’s words, "The duty to keep a contract at
common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do
not keep it -- and nothing else."
Christine Chappuis is a Professor at the Faculty of Law of the
University of Geneva, Switzerland, where she teaches contract and tort
law. Her research focuses on those fields as well as on international
contracts and international harmonization of contract law. She is
currently working with a group of colleagues on a restatement of the
Swiss law of obligations funded by the Swiss National Science
Foundation. Ms. Chappuis takes part in the Working Group for the
preparation of the third edition of the UNIDROIT Principles of
International Commercial Contracts and is a member of the Groupe de
Travail Contrats Internationaux, an international group of corporate
lawyers, professors and members of the bar working on the basis of
clauses taken from the members’ professional experience. Admitted to
the Bar, she was active as counsel to Geneva law firms before joining
the University in 1999. Former president of the Geneva Law Society,
she was also president of the General Assembly of Professors of the
University of Geneva, of the Private Law Section of the Law Faculty
and is currently President of the Foundation for the Faculty of
Theology. She is author and editor of several important books and
papers focusing on international harmonization of contract law and
contract practice. She obtained her PhD grade in 1989 and was
awarded the Walther Hug prize among other honours.
