Lex-Mercatoria
Law Merchant and Admiralty (Distinguished)
Law merchant and admiralty are routinely merged in the sovereignty literature — and they are genuinely related, sharing civilian roots and a non-common-law origin. But they are different kinds of thing. Admiralty is a jurisdiction: a constitutional grant, a dedicated federal forum, and its own procedure. The law merchant is a body of substantive commercial doctrine, absorbed into the ordinary courts and codified as the UCC. Admiralty answers which court and what procedure; the law merchant answers which rules govern the deal. Keeping the two apart is what lets 'the UCC is in control' be supported while 'the courts are operating in admiralty' stays foreclosed.
Law Merchant (Lex Mercatoria)
The body of customary commercial law that grew out of medieval European trading fairs, was administered by merchant courts, and was absorbed into the common law and later codified — surviving in the modern Uniform Commercial Code, which names it by its own terms as a supplementary source. A real and recognized legal tradition; the question Adverse Review presses is how much of the modern commercial system it actually governs.
The Real Exits: Commercial Solutions to a Commercial Problem
Six commercial or procedural mechanisms by which people actually escape, sidestep, or compel performance from the modern American legal system: extreme wealth, powerful friends, formal expatriation, multiple citizenships, creative trusts (including the entertainment industry's standard loan-out structure), and enforcing the contract through § 1983, qui tam, FOIA, and the Tax Court. The theological exits don't work. The working exits are commercial — and that fact validates Beers's diagnosis more powerfully than the treatises do.
Introduction to Law Merchant
Treatise #8 of Beers's 11-treatise corpus. Argues that the law merchant (*lex mercatoria*) — the historical commercial law system of global merchants — has replaced common law as the operative legal system in America, enabling merchant-creditors to control nations through debt and security interests. The Uniform Commercial Code is presented as the modern expression of these principles.