The somewhat uncommon law of commerce

Abstract

It gives me great pleasure to be here at Lincoln's Inn to deliver this year's COMBAR lecture. As lawyers, we hold membership not just of our own legal systems; we belong also to a global fraternity, and it is in this spirit that I take up this evening's subject. It is a subject which is close to the hearts of both our legal communities, situated as we are in the financial centres of Europe on the one hand and South East Asia on the other. At the same time it is also in the sphere of commerce that the dualism between an international outlook and a domestic rootedness is perhaps at its most visceral. How we choose to structure and propagate our laws of commerce can have an impact on the calculus of economic actors and, consequently, on the behaviour of the markets they transact in.