Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

From Usages Of Merchants To Default Rules: Practices Of Trade, Ius Commune And Urban Law In Early Modern Antwerp, Dave De Ruysscher

Dave De ruysscher

In sixteenth-century Antwerp, commercial contracts were supported with refined government-made rules that brought techniques, usages and customs practised by merchants to the level of sophisticated law. Because no body of unwritten substantive law on commerce existed and because commercial practices were often too rudimentary from a legal perspective, in the 1500s detailed and balanced normative precepts on contracts of trade came to be crafted. When in the first decades of the sixteenth century more and more foreign merchants visited Antwerp, its rulers gradually started supplementing and upgrading practices of merchants to default rules regarding contracts, with materials and concepts drawn …