Lex mercatoria

Gralf-Peter Calliess ()

No 52 / 2015, ZenTra Working Papers in Transnational Studies from ZenTra - Center for Transnational Studies

Abstract: Lex mercatoria or Law Merchant (‘LM’) is said to be the self-made law of international commerce. According to its proponents, LM is an autonomous legal order that not only supplements state commercial law, but works as a substitute for it. The ‘ancient’ LM, which accompanied the commercial revolution in late medieval Europe, is taken as a blueprint for ‘new’ LM, a transnational law that develops in international commercial arbitration to govern modern global commerce. According to its opponents, ancient LM as a uniform customary law of Europe never existed. Rather it was dreamed-up in order to support the neo-liberal agenda of new LM. This paper investigates the historical and empirical foundations of these claims in the three dimensions of transnational dispute resolution, norm making, and enforcement. It is concluded that truly autonomous transnational legal regimes are industry-specific exceptions, where socio-economic sanctions are formally organized. Transnational commercial law in general is characterised by a hybrid mode of governance, which combines institutions of private (norms, arbitration, and social sanctions) and public (laws, courts, and enforcement) origin. However, the latter are disembedded from their domestic context to a considerable extent.

Keywords: Law Merchant; international commercial arbitration; transnational law; cross-border contracts; international trade; private international law; conflict of laws; contract enforcement; general principles of law; party autonomy; trade usage; standard form contracts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A14 B11 B15 F13 F14 F15 F23 K12 K33 K41 K49 L14 L22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2015-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-law
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http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2597583 First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zen:wpaper:52

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