Today's most pressing constitutional question is posed by a global economic system whose expansive tendencies seem no longer controllable. The current financial/debt crisis has triggered diverse reactions in the political arena ranging from the reformist ordo-liberal approach followed by France...

The notion of a transnational law has been under dispute for several decades. After Philip Jessup in his widely-known Storrs Lecture on Jurisprudence at the Yale Law School had coined the phrase in 1956, it has been used in numerous contexts. One of the most influential narratives of...

Commerce always requires an institutional embedment. Basically, private Institutions as well as state institutions can provide the normative good of legal certainty understood as the enforceability of contractual commitments. While for domestic commerce, the balance between the importance of...

The globalization process stimulates more and more start-ups entering international markets at their earliest convenience. Supported by modern IT and logistics systems, this option is available for many ventures that become more and more independent from their country of origin. For...

First, this article proposes that the rise of the Internet and further information- and communication technologies (ICT) has facilitated the evolution of a new, virtual form of relational contracts. This hypothesis is developed inductively by drawing on the results of an explorative empirical...

Transnational corporations (TNCs) recently face a dilemma: they coevally have to exploit global-based as well as locally enrooted business opportunities ('glocal dilemma'). This brings the aspect of formal and informal coordination to an issue. In our conceptual paper we focus on formal...

While intra-firm trade accounts for at least one third of world exports, we know very little about the institutions which are employed to resolve intra-firm trade conflicts. According to Oliver Williamson, courts are not accessible and conflicts resulting from intra-firm trade are resolved by...

In the age of globalization the relevance of international trade has increased tremendously. As a consequence, many transactions go beyond the legal framework of the nation state. Mechanisms provided by the nation states are not anymore suitable to secure international transactions. The...

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...