From Usages of Merchants to Default Rules: Practices of Trade, Ius Commune and Urban Law in Early Modern Antwerp Vrije Universiteit Brussel
In sixteenth-century Antwerp, commercial contracts were supported with refined government-made rules that brought techniques, usages and customs practised by merchants to the level of sophisticated law. Because no body of unwritten substantive law on commerce existed and because commercial practices were often too rudimentary from a legal perspective, in the 1500s detailed and balanced normative precepts on contracts of trade came to be crafted. ...