The Adjustment of Long-Term Supply Contracts: Experience from German Gas Price Case Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Long-term contracts make it difficult for the contracting partners to foresee and to integrate the future development into the contract. One way to deal with this uncertainty is to provide a legal right to price adjustment; another is to include contractual terms to the same effect. Both mechanisms are present in German law related to gas supply, and both mechanisms have given rise to large-scale litigation triggered by massive price increases in the past years. This article focuses on the judicial control of unilateral price determination by the gas supplier. It shows that courts mainly exercise procedural control, looking at the transparency of the conditions for price increases, whereas they do not enter into the calculation of the adequate or fair price. Résumé: Dans les contrats à long terme, il est difficile pour les parties contractantes de prévoir et d'intégrer les développements futurs dans le contrat. Une façon de faire face à cette incertitude est de prévoir un droit légal à l'ajustement de prix, une autre façon consiste à inclure des clauses contractuelles ayant le même effet. Ces deux mécanismes existent en droit allemand en matière de fourniture de gaz et ces deux mécanismes ont donné lieu à un accroissement du nombre de litiges dû aux fréquentes augmentations de prix durant ces dernières années. Le présent article analyse le contrôle judiciaire de la fixation unilatérale du prix par le fournisseur de gaz. Il indique que les cours et tribunaux exercent principalement un contrôle procédural, examinant la transparence des conditions d'augmentations de prix, sans toutefois intervenir dans le calcul du prix juste ou adéquat. Zusammenfassung: Langzeitverträge erschweren es den Vertragsparteien, künftige Entwicklungen vorherzusehen und in den Vertrag zu integrieren. Ein Weg, mit dieser Unsicherheit umzugehen, sind gesetzliche Preisanpassungsrechte, ein anderer besteht in vertraglichen Preisanpassungsklauseln. Beide Mechanismen finden wir im deutschen Recht der Gasversorgungsverträge, und beide Mechanismen waren wegen der erheblichen Gaspreiserhöhungen der vergangenen Jahre Gegenstand einer Vielzahl gerichtlicher Verfahren. Dieser Aufsatz befasst sich mit der gerichtlichen Überprüfung einseitiger Preisbestimmungen durch den Gasversorger. Er zeigt, dass Gerichte sich auf Verfahrensfragen und Transparenz fokussieren, wohingegen eine echte Überprüfung des angemessenen oder fairen Preises unterbleibt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".