Read the following passage carefully.
The conventional historiography of the lex mercatoria (merchant law) in medieval Europe posits that it emerged as an autonomous, transnational body of customary law, spontaneously generated by the merchant class to bypass the cumbersome procedures of local civil and canonical courts. According to this 'universalist' paradigm, the lex mercatoria was remarkably uniform across different regions, rooted in practical commercial needs rather than state authority, and adjudicated by merchant tribunals that applied equitable principles free from the formalistic constraints of the ius commune. However, recent archival research into the records of the fair courts of Champagne and the civic tribunals of northern Italian city-states has severely challenged this narrative.
Revisionist legal historians demonstrate that what scholars previously categorized as 'spontaneous merchant custom' was, in fact, inextricably enmeshed with local statutory law and jurisdictional sovereignty. The procedures of the merchant courts, far from being entirely informal and divorced from the ius commune, heavily adapted Romanocanonical inquisitorial techniques, particularly regarding the taking of evidence and the role of the notary. Furthermore, the supposed 'uniformity' of the lex mercatoria has been exposed as an illusion; commercial practices and legal rulings concerning debt instruments—such as the bill of exchange—varied significantly between Genoa, Venice, and the Champagne fairs, contingent upon the varying degrees to which local municipalities sought to regulate credit to protect their own financial monopolies.
Crucially, the enforcement of merchant court decisions relied entirely on the coercive apparatus of the local territorial ruler or municipality. A judgment rendered by a merchant consul in Bruges held no practical weight in London unless recognized by English civic authorities, who often subjected such foreign judgments to rigorous review against their own local statutes. Therefore, rather than a stateless, universal code, the medieval lex mercatoria is more accurately understood as a fragmented array of specialized procedural privileges, strategically negotiated between merchant guilds and sovereign powers, which utilized the conceptual vocabulary of the ius commune to legitimize local economic control.
Evaluate the following statement based on the passage:
It can be inferred from the passage that the revisionist legal historians view the English civic authorities' practice of reviewing foreign merchant judgments against local statutes as an example of sovereign powers using the framework of commercial dispute resolution to assert their own local economic and jurisdictional control.
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