Our account of the Law Merchant system is, of course, incomplete. Once disputes came to be resolved in a centralized way, the merchants in Western Europe enhanced and refined their private legal code to serve the needs of the merchant trade - all prior to the rise of the nation-state. Without this code and the system for enforcement, trade among virtual strangers would have been much more cumbersome, or even impossible.

XREF: Connects to institutional economics and theories about private governance preceding state authority, such as Ellickson's work on order without law or the historical development of lex mercatoria.

PAUL R. MILGRO, PAUL R. MILGRO - THE ROLE O…, loc. 165