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This article considers how the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts ('UPICC') respond to the typical form of commercial contract--the relational contract. Relational contracts provide a 'framework' for relationships, allowing them to develop over time. The temporal element gives rise to peculiar issues, including: the need to accommodate changed circumstances; whether to keep the contract alive or terminate it in response to changed circumstances; contractual discretions and the role of fault and good faith; the role of contractual mechanisms for dealing with supervening risks. The article considers various of the provisions of the UPICC dealing with these issues and concludes with a consideration of possible new directions, including the proposal for a future edition of the UPICC that certain contracts can be terminated for 'just cause'. As Australian commerce becomes more international in nature, we need a common framework--a 'new law merchant'--by which contractual relations are maintained. The Australian case law on relational contracts is thin. The UPICC will prod Australian courts and practitioners to grapple with these issues. However, that effort might stall if commercial parties believe the rules in the new law merchant are too open-textured, allowing too much judicial intervention in contracting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TRIPS Agreement subsumes and applies the earlier international law of intellectual property (notably the Paris and Berne Conventions), but is typically distinguished from this juristic heritage by the still controversial reframing of intellectual property law as trade law, and by the more rigorous and compelling character of the dispute settlement mechanism that purportedly gives it 'teeth'. The threat of 'trade sanctions' would suggest that a realist assessment of the likely practical impact of TRIPS dispute settlement would govern national policy choices, more than compliance viewed as an end in itself. This paper reviews the actual interests defined and defended in TRIPS dispute settlement and seeks to illuminate the true character of the TRIPS Agreement as a regime of intellectual property standard-setting within a trade law framework. It concludes that practical experience confirms that a theoretical reconciliation of the supposed tension between intellectual property and 'real' trade law, and the development of an integrated, systematic jurisprudence of the TRIPS Agreement as the most robust defence of legitimate domestic policymaking on knowledge economy issues are now overdue, recalling that the true interpreter of the treaty text — the one ultimately bound to deliver on the promises of public welfare embedded therein — is a domestic policymaker seeking in good faith to establish an optimal balancing of interests through the practical craft of domestic policymaking, rather than a political or legalistic abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]