The new Lex Mercatoria and transnational governance

Abstract

Over the past four decades, the transnational business community has successfully built a private system of transnational governance: the new Lex Mercatoria . The actors who operate this system - firms, their lawyers, international arbitrators, and legal academics - have evolved, and use, 'a-national principles of contract and a system of private 'courts to organize and regulate cross-border commercial exchange. National legal systems have adapted to the Lex Mercatoria , thereby enhancing the latter's autonomy, and the EU has begun to move in the same direction.