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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
From St. Ives To Cyberspace: The Modern Distortion Of The Medieval ‘Law Merchant’, Stephen E. Sachs
From St. Ives To Cyberspace: The Modern Distortion Of The Medieval ‘Law Merchant’, Stephen E. Sachs
Faculty Scholarship
Modern advocates of corporate self-regulation have drawn unlikely inspiration from the Middle Ages. On the traditional view of history, medieval merchants who wandered from fair to fair were not governed by domestic laws, but by their own lex mercatoria, or "law merchant. " This law, which uniformly regulated commerce across Europe, was supposedly produced by an autonomous merchant class, interpreted in private courts, and enforced through private sanctions rather than state coercion. Contemporary writers have treated global corporations as descendants of these itinerant traders, urging them to replace conflicting national laws with a transnational law of their own creation. The …
Checks And Balances: Congress And The Federal Court, Paul D. Carrington
Checks And Balances: Congress And The Federal Court, Paul D. Carrington
Faculty Scholarship
This essay was published as a chapter in Reforming the Supreme Court: Term Limits for Justices (Paul D. Carrington & Roger Cramton eds, Carolina Academic Press 2006). Its point is that Congress has long neglected its duty implicit in the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers to constrain the tendency of the Court, the academy and the legal profession to inflate the Court's status and power. The term "life tenure" is a significant source of a sense of royal status having not only the adverse cultural effects noted by Nagel, but also doleful effects on the administration and enforcement of …