The Outline Of Contract Objective Research

The paper mainly includes two parts: theoretical development of contract objective, interpretation and application of contract objective.The introduction of the paper introduces the reasons, the current situation, the scope and the methods of the research in this paper. Contract objective is provided in《Contract Law of the People's Republic of China》,《French Civil Code》,《Germany Civil Code》and other codes, while the connotation of contract objective is not provided in Chinese statutes, is seldom discussed in Chinese academia, therefore, the interpretation and application of contract objective is at a loss in china. In foreign academia, overall perspectives of the theory of contract objective can be made clear by reviewing cause theory of the continental law system; in Common Law System and related international treaties, objective failure theory and fundamental breach theory provide significant inspiration for the judge of contract objective failure.The first part of the paper is the delimiting of the connotation of contract objective. This part mainly discusses the related provisions of contract objective in《Contract Law of the People's Republic of China》, foreign codes and related international treaties. The paper defines contract objective as: contract objective is the expected profits of contract parties when contracts are concluded, the expected profits includes economic profits, spiritual profits, social profits and so on. Furthermore, generalized contract objective also includes objectives of contract forms.The second part of the paper is theoretical development of contract objective. In the continental law system, through drawing support from cause theory of the Aristotelianism, Annotation jurists and Furnishing jurists in Middle Ages added juristic meanings to"objective cause"and made it became the predecessor of contract objective. Later on, French scholars made clear distinctions between immediate cause and remote cause of contracts parties, and between direct objective and contract motivation. Germany scholars made distinction between contract objective and contract motivation, and put forward the theory of typical transaction objective, while motivation was not taken seriously as in French. Taiwan scholars followed theories of Germany scholars, made distinction between contract objective and contract motivation, and emphasized that if contract motivation is in consensus between contract parties, it will become the effective element of the contract and contract parties are supposed to share responsibility for risks of the contract. In objective failure theory of Common Law System,realization of contract objective is one of judgement standard of contract performance. Furthermore, Corbin classified contract objective as direct objective and indirect objective and contributed greatly to deep-going and detail understanding of contract objective.The paper mainly discusses the interpretation and application of contract objective from part three to part six.In order to understand contract objective deeply, contract objective is classified as: definite objective and abstract objective, common objective and respective objective, direct objective and indirect objective, major objective and minor objective and so on. The above mentioned classifications of contract objective are meaningful to interpretations of special contracts. In the course of contracts interpretations, contract objective could govern clauses of contracts, remedy leaks of contracts and contribute greatly to qualitative judgements of contractual legal relations. In the course of contracts performances, contract objective could control and correct contracts performances. As the ground of terminating contracts,"failing to realize contract objective"is essential to profits of contracts parties. To the problem of judgement of"failing to realize contract objective", the paper puts forward that judgement standard of fundamental breach in international treaties can be used for reference, such as: whether the nonperformance substantially deprive the profit expectation of contract parties and can't redeem; whether the litigation of performing the non-performed clauses is the essential connotation of the contract; if the contract is terminated, compare to performing party, whether the non-forming party suffer the incommensurate lose and so on. To the problem of ascertaining contract objective, the paper puts forward that written reviewing of contracts text, judgement of contract type, judgement of use value of contractual subject matter, collection of contracting information and other methods can be applied.