Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our cells' lunchtime lecture.

I'm personally very pleased that we have one of Europe's most eminent private lawyers

with us today.

Professor Ingeborg Schwenzer has the chair

in private law in the University of Basel

and she's also the chair of the CISG advisory council.

She is a very accomplished author,

and her commentary on the CISG is one of the leading publications in German, in English, and I just heard also in Portuguese.

Spanish.

In Spanish as well.

We are very much looking forward to her lecture, which is going to talk about regional and global unification of contract law today.

Welcome to Cambridge, Professor Fredson.

Thank you very much for the kind introduction.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very happy and pleased to be here and have the possibility

to talk a bit about regional and global unification of contract law at this lunchtime lecture.

I have just heard that I have to considerably shorten my presentation, so you will see I will have to skip certain slides so in order that we have the chance to possibly discuss a bit of what I'm going to tell you.

So I will skip this, the introduction you all know about the development of international trade and that these economic developments have prompted legal

answers in many, many fields. I want to talk about contract law that is at the very heart of

international trade. Contract law law and especially commercial contract law

has always been at the forefront of harmonization

and unification of private law.

The reason is that different domestic laws

...