Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
For much of the twentieth century, legal historians and scholars of international trade embraced a romanticized narrative concerning the origins of transnational commercial law. According to this orthodox account, medieval European merchants, frustrated by the fragmented, formalistic, and territorial jurisdictions of feudal courts, spontaneously created their own private, customary legal order known as the lex mercatoria (law merchant). Prominent proponents of this view asserted that the lex mercatoria constituted a stateless, universally recognized, and equitable body of substantive rules, developed and adjudicated exclusively by merchants in specialized fair courts and maritime consulates. Under this historical paradigm, cross-border commercial dispute resolution functioned smoothly across medieval Europe without the coercive backing, statutory codification, or institutional interference of sovereign states.
Over the past several decades, however, rigorous archival research conducted by revisionist legal historians has thoroughly undermined this foundational myth. By examining the surviving court rolls and municipal registries of medieval commercial centers such as Champagne, Bruges, and London, revisionist scholars have demonstrated that substantive mercantile customs were neither uniform across regions nor autonomous from domestic legal structures. Rather, medieval merchants consistently operated within, and relied upon, the coercive jurisdictional machinery of local princes, municipal magistrates, and royal courts. When mercantile disputes were resolved in fair courts, these tribunals derived their legitimate enforcement power from royal charters, and the procedural rules applied were deeply intertwined with local statutory and customary law. The idealized vision of a stateless, self-regulating commercial order governed by a universally harmonized code of merchant customs was largely an anachronistic projection of modern legal theory onto fragmented medieval records.
Nevertheless, the persistence of the lex mercatoria myth cannot be attributed solely to flawed historical scholarship. As several contemporary legal theorists have pointed out, the narrative of a stateless medieval commercial law has served an indispensable ideological purpose in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Modern advocates of private commercial arbitration and international business self-regulation have actively invoked the historical precedent of the medieval lex mercatoria to justify insulating cross-border corporate transactions from the regulatory authority of modern nation-states. By presenting private dispute resolution not as a recent institutional innovation driven by commercial interests, but as the revival of an ancient, organic legal tradition, proponents of transnational commercial autonomy have successfully constructed a powerful historical pedigree for contemporary private governance. Thus, the enduring significance of the lex mercatoria lies not in its historical reality as a medieval commercial code, but in its strategic utility as a foundational narrative for modern arbitration.
Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main idea of the passage?
- AArchival records from medieval commercial centers demonstrate that merchant tribunals were never genuinely autonomous, operating instead under the procedural authority and coercive enforcement of municipal magistrates and sovereign charters.
- BMedieval European merchants established an equitable, universally recognized body of customary law that functioned smoothly across borders without the institutional interference or statutory backing of sovereign states.
- Although archival evidence refutes the historical reality of an autonomous medieval merchant law, the myth endures largely because modern arbitration advocates exploit it to legitimize private transnational commercial governance.Answer
- DBecause modern international commercial arbitration lacks legitimate legal grounding, legal historians have rewritten the history of medieval fair courts to justify the total deregulation of cross-border corporate transactions.
- EThe procedural mechanisms developed in medieval commercial fair courts were so effective that modern nation-states have increasingly incorporated customary mercantile practices into domestic statutory codes.