The Law of Commerce and Trade

Abstract

This chapter discusses the history of American commercial law covering the admiralty and general commerce, sale of goods, bankruptcy and insolvency, and contract. American commercial law was deeply and persistently in debt to England. Theoretically, even national sovereignty was no barrier. The laws of admiralty, marine insurance, commercial paper, and sale of goods were not, supposedly, parochial law, English law; they were part of an international body of rules. The law of sales of goods developed greatly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Many, if not most, of the leading cases were English and were adopted in the United States fairly rapidly. Two strains of law—contract and the law merchant—each with a somewhat different emphasis, were more or less godparents of the law of sales.