The integration of sustainable development goals in the international sales contracts of biofuels highlights a new role for international contract law. This article examines how the substantive rules of the UN Convention on International Sale of Goods (CISG) may contribute to the implementation of sustainable development and the applicability of the “sustainability clauses.” The contracting parties, including the final buyers of a global supply chain have the right to demand enforcement of these contractual clauses. However, the CISG is limited as to the legal effects international contracts have for third-parties that benefit or are interested in the sustainable development of biofuels. In this context, the contractual tool used in the international trade of sustainable products becomes not only useful but also indispensable.

Ownership is an essential feature of trusts that serves as a useful analytical and comparative tool in order to cross legal traditions and compare different legal institutions, which to a greater or lesser extent serve similar socio-economic and legal functions. The concentration on ownership enables one to burrow down into the normative roots of different legal traditions. This article comprises three substantive parts: first, characterizing ownership and the manner in which this concept distinguishes the civil and common law traditions; second, contextualizing ownership in relation to trusts from different legal systems; and, third, conceptualizing some contemporary challenges arising out of the divergent nature of ownership in the phenomenology of the trust paradigm, the value of the trust to comparative law and its effect on the civil law as a distinct tradition. It is argued that trusts necessarily involve the fiduciary administration of property and that ‘fiduciary ownership’ is a better shorthand description of the encumbered nature of trust property, rather than ‘dual’ or ‘split’ ownership, which is misleading and mistaken.