ANNOUNCEMENT

Lex Mercatoria Online

The CENTRAL Transnational Law Database at http://www.tldb.de⁽¹⁾

Since the end of 2001, the Center for Transnational Law (CENTRAL), Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany, has made available online the Transnational Law Database – or TLDB.

The TLDB is designed to provide the hitherto ‘missing link’ between the theory of transnational commercial law and international legal practice. For the first time, practitioners and academics have at their disposal, by means of the Internet, a highly accessible online working tool for the practical application of transnational commercial law.

Purposes
The main purpose of the TLDB is to help international practitioners and academics to save the time and money that must be invested in the comparative research in order to determine the components of the new lex mercatoria. Attorneys, in-house-counsels, arbitrators or judges always face a formidable task in determining the contents of this legal system through the application of functional comparative methodology. This function is now performed by means of a simple mouseclick when using the TLDB. The comparative materials included in the TLDB consist of 640 documents (arbitral awards, statutes, conventions, model laws, standard forms, doctrine, etc.) with more than 1,470 references for the 74 principles and rules included in the list which forms the core part of the Database.

Another, major purpose of the TLDB is to spread knowledge about the contents of transnational commercial law around the globe. Recent empirical studies revealed that international practitioners hesitate to make use of this concept not because they have doubts about the methodical basis of the concept but simply because they lack the knowledge about transnational law and do not want to use standard business negotiations as a laboratory for ‘innovative’ solutions.

International practice can use the TLDB for a variety of purposes, for example:
– as a means to determine the applicable rules in a dispute, if the parties have chosen transnational commercial law or if the arbitrators decide to apply this concept to the case before them;
– as a means to allow for an autonomous interpretation of and for the filling of internal gaps in international conventions and other uniform law instruments;
– as a means to allow for the ‘internationally useful construction’ of domestic law in international disputes;
– as a means to supplement or correct a future European Civil Code in international commercial disputes;
– as a means to provide information about transnational law to other sciences (politics, economics, sociology) which are also exploring the clash between the territorial limitations of the law and the transnationalization of international commerce and trade in an era of globalization.

The TLDB is also intended to provide a means for the ‘codification’ of transnational commercial law. The lex mercatoria as ‘law in action’ requires a degree of codificatory flexibility and subtlety that goes far beyond that which any code, model law, convention or restatement can provide. Thus, in the context of the lex mercatoria, the term ‘codification’ assumes a new meaning.

1. This announcement is based on an article by Klaus Peter Berger with the same title, to be published in Arbitration International (2002).