Good Faith: A Semiotic Approach

In: European Review of Private Law, Band 10, Heft 2, S. 279-301

Abstract

The meaning, function and desirable scope of good faith in contractual performance is one of the most pervasive problems of European as well as American contract law. Yet, the discussion seems to be locked into a set of inescapable dilemmas which frequently reappear as a typical, but unsatisfactory part of academic contributions and judicial opinions; namely, the controversies between an individualist ethics of freedom of contract and the opposing altruist value of interpersonal responsibility, between the danger of judicial arbitrariness and the demand for equitable flexibility, and, finally, between the legitimacy of judicial law making and the insistence on judicial restraint. This article attempts to show a pattern behind this structure, consisting of a relatively small set of typical arguments which appear in ordered pairs of diametrical oppositions such as those mentioned above. This suggests that good faith language is much less tailored to context and much more dependent on a preexistent structure of stereotyped arguments than it usually appears in the practice of legal discourse. This insight implies a new assessment of the cogency of argument patterns deployed in theoretical and doctrinal statements on good faith.