SECOND PART THE BOUNDARIES OF THE NEW CONTRACT LAW The new general contract law does not make a clean slate of the past. It must find its place within a complex legal environment, which takes account, for reasons of legal certainty, of the contracts concluded previously, but also of the will of the parties and the existence of special legal regimes that it is not intended to alter. The implementation of this new contract law therefore raises issues of boundaries ("frontiers") for the practitioner that must be resolved before even considering the content of the new provisions. These "border-issues" are four-fold and they concern : boundaries as regard the time (application over time of the new provisions), the legal environment (articulation between general law and special law), the space (application in an international context), and contractual freedom (suppletive/non-mandatory or imperative/mandatory nature of the new contract law provisions). 269