18 - Consumer sales and associated guarantees

Summary

Sale of goods:

The sale of goods is essential for the daily life of everybody, so it is no wonder, therefore, that this type of contract is at the centre of private law. All the European codifications grant it a prominent place. Even jurisdictions which rely on the doctrine of precedent have codified aspects of sales law by enacting legislation, such as Great Britain in the Sale of Goods Act 1979, or Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden in their Nordic Uniform Act on the Law Applicable to International Sales of Goods 1964. Moreover, since Roman times, the solutions developed for legal problems of sales have regularly been the forerunner and model for general contract law.

Astonishingly, when the European Community cautiously began to harmonise and ‘Europeanise’ commercially relevant private law, particularly consumer contract law, in the mid-1980s it did not start with sales, but with doorstep contracts. But it took until the early 1990s for the EU to extend its activities to the core of civil law and into the field of sale of goods. Finally, on the eve of the new millennium in 1999, Directive 99/44/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 25 May 1999 on Certain Aspects of the Sale of Consumer Goods and Associated Guarantees was enacted, and the Member States had to implement the directive by the end of 2001.