Third Party Rights in Contract

This chapter provides a comparative and historical study, ranging across civil law and common law systems, of the problems and pitfalls of codification with special reference to China and Scotland and the law of third party rights in contract. It provides arguments for the inclusion of a provision on this subject in the Chinese Contract Law and for a statutory modernization to rescue Scots law from the position of being, as one critic has put it, stuck in the seventeenth century. The chapter discusses the codification of third party rights in Scotland, Hong Kong and China. In third party rights codification, risk is inherent, not just in codifying, but in legislating generally. An aspect of the risk of fixation is the ‘disconnect’ which can open up between the text and what happens in court and in practice. The other possible hazard is incompleteness.