On The Format War

Today, contract has become the basic form for transactions. In order to promote speed and convenience of the transaction forms containing general terms and conditions are applied in today's trade. The parties of the trade are doing their best to maximize their own interests, so, the battle of the forms is inevitable. The solution of this problem is so Important that the domestic legislation around the world have make the appropriate legal provisions, the international unification legislation also solve this problem. This article, the author tries to analyze the domestic legislation of France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States as well as the provisions of "United Nations Convention on Contracts for International Sale of Goods", "International Commercial Contracts", "Principles of European Contract Law", in order to put forward feasible proposals for perfect our contract legislation.This paper is divided into four parts; the first part introduces the origin of the battle of the forms. First of all, through the theory of offer and acceptance, describes the establishment of the contract, and thus introduced the battle of the forms. Then talks about the solution to the problem starts with the Mirror Images and its defect and breakthrough.The second part, the author describes the world's four typical country's domestic legislation on the "the battle of the forms". Germany is using the knockout rule to resolve the issue, the court developed a new theory through a new sentence; In French, the prevailing method of this issue is the knockout rule, but the application of this rule is flexible; the Britain is using the "the last shot rule", the practice does not have any breakthroughs; Article 2-207 of "the United States Uniform Commercial Code" desired to end "the battle of the forms", but in practice ,it comes with many problems. Although the amendment of Article 2-207 has some progress, not well enough.The third part describes the international unification legislation about "the battle of the forms". CISG divides the changes of the acceptance into substantive and non-substantive changes, but substantive changes defined in it are too broad and have been criticized; the approach of "International Commercial Contracts" and PECL is more reasonable and equitable, both of them make the conflict into"conflict of general terms"and"conflict of important terms", and provide corresponding rules to address them.The fourth part, the author describes the overview of China's legislation, and puts forward some suggestions to perfect it. In my opinion, we should adhere to "the principle of freedom of contract", with full respect to the freedom of the parties; we should accept the establishment of a contract as far as possible. We should respect the free will of the parties to conform the contain of the contract, and achieve justice.