Access to Court is a gobal principle, though the consequences of this principle are interpreted differently in the U.S. and Europe. Neither International Commercial Arbitration nor International Litigation can offer an effective access to court for cross-border commercial contracts. Whereas...

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...

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...

This paper elaborates on a fundamental transformation of maritime law. On the basis of statistics it is argued that the London Maritime Arbitration Association (LMAA) has become the dominant provider on the global market for dispute resolution in the maritime industry, but currently is...

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...

International business disputes rarely go to court, but sometimes they do.By virtue of the internationally accepted principle of party autonomy, business partners involved in cross-border transactions are entitled to select their forum of choice for any dispute which may arise from their...

For almost half a century, the mainstream law-and-economics movement in contract law has zealously protected the parsimony – or simplicity – of economic analysis. The faith in ever-increasing formality is captured both by stubbornly spare assumptions about human behavior and tightly...

The administrative state is leveraging algorithms to influence individuals' private decisions. Agencies have begun to write rules to shape for-profit websites such as Expedia and have launched their own online tools such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's mortgage calculator. These...

Businesses and sophisticated parties have long used “contract exchanges,” like the Chicago Board of Trade, to obtain a fair price and protect themselves from market volatility. These contract exchanges have greatly benefitted both their participants and the public at large, but participation...

Herein I outline an alternative theory of contract and contract enforcement. This theory is based upon two claims, one positive and one normative. The first claim is that incomplete contracting theory fails to explain how economic actors govern production in the new economy. Theories of...