MEI Transsystemic Law Research Cluster proudly presents

Reimagining Lex Mercatoria 

(a full-day international conference)

Conference Statement

Lex Mercatoria (the law of merchants) has a mythical legal status, which whether true or not, influences legal thinking to this day. It harks back to a time of Venetian traders and a complex amalgam of European principalities that, it was believed, required merchants to establish their own private ‘law’ to facilitate commerce that applied beyond borders and influenced the public sphere through the formation of state enterprises. In recent years, legal scholars and practitioners are re-imagining Lex Mercatoria in order to facilitate globalization.

The aim of the workshop is to investigate how Lex Mercatoria was understood in the past and how it is being re-imagined today. How did the operation of large multinational trading companies such as the Dutch and British East India Companies influence the development of a Lex Mercatoria? Are there any parallels with the legal regimes that were associated with these companies in the past and the law of today? Can we reimagine Lex Mercatoria within global cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai as places for re-configuring global legal interactions?

This workshop will consider how these discussions and activities are transforming the nature of the translocal (places where the global is made local). We want to understand how these political, economic, social and technological transformations are affecting traders, corporations and lawyers engaged in transnational legal interactions. These new modes of transnational legal activities, and the points in which legal systems meeting (the Transystemic), are seen in international commercial arbitrations and cross-border transactions.

The workshop will bring together academics and lawyers to discuss the theoretical and practical nature of a re-imagined Lex Mercatoria for the 21st Century.