Lex Mercatoria - Hoist with Its Own Petard?

The literature advocating lex mercatoria has periodically been enhanced by attempts to provide evidence of its existence and, at the same time, to make it more accessible by formulating-or codifying-its rules. One such attempt was a series of proposals to use international law as a tool for imposing uniform special rules for international trade. Others have been the formulation of non- binding general principles of international commercial contract law by UNIDROIT, the Cornell Common Core project, the Lando Commission Principles of European Contract Law, the various ICC formulations and, finally, general lists of principles formulated by prominent scholars in the area of lex mercatoria such as Berthold Goldman, Lord Mustill, and most recently Klaus Peter Berger. I should like to take this opportunity of discussing the relationship of lex mercatoria with both national and international law to reexamine the question of its autonomy in the light of this move towards codification. I shall suggest that these relationships and the inevitable process of institutionalisation through codification undermine all claims to an autonomous lex mercatoria and produce the antithesis of what is offered as its model. [CONT

"A Loyal Business Partner": A Story told in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Zakho

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Functional disability and death wishes in older Europeans: results from the EURODEP concerted action

Functional disability was independently associated with death wishes in older adults. Results can help inform clinicians who care for older persons with functional impairment.</p

Preface to Herodotus: The Prehistory of Prose in the Archaic Age

Classical scholarship holds ancient Greek prose literature to have originated in the archaic period in the imposing shadow of Greek verse, primitive and derivative in form, and subservient in status. If this were so, the Greeks would have had little reason to begin writing prose. This dissertation is devoted to answering the question why they did, and argues that the traditional view of the rise of Greek prose is skewed by the western concept of prose. Archaic Greek society did not have a concept of “prose”, and certainly didn’t consider the prose it produced “prosaic”. The confused narrative of the rise of Greek prose results from a similarly confused understanding of the term “prose” in the western tradition, which is typically taken for granted. The introduction discusses the term and advocates taking a pragmatic approach to “prose”, as a language used in situations of distance, concrete and abstract, rather than the traditional rhetorical understanding of it as Kunstprosa, language boasting rhetorical figures. In so doing it lays the groundwork for uncovering antecedent cultures of prose which render the composition and reception of archaic prose intelligible. Chapter 1 argues for the existence of vibrant traditions of oral prose which produced specimens of verbal art endowed with commanding authority. Chapter 2 studies the prose of the earliest Greek alphabetic writing, preserved in inscriptions, and finds it to furnish further evidence for the vitality of oral prose traditions in archaic Greece. Chapter 3 then proceeds to examine a particular kind of written prose which later came to be considered “literary”, and makes the case that what was new in the sixth century BCE was not literary texts in prose, but the practice of attributing texts in prose – and verse – to authors. The language of these texts, in prose no less than in verse, was deeply traditional and highly authoritative. Finally, the epilogue points the way forward to a consideration of the question how the concept of prose later emerged, that is to say how ancient Greek prose came to be “prose”