LA LEX MERCATORIA ED I RAPPORTI CON LE LAW FIRMS

The so-called lex mercatoria and the role of the law firms The purpose of my prospective research is to understand to what extent law firms cooperate in the process of creation, development and application of lex mercatoria. Two contrasting theses have actually been put forward in Italy about this question. On the one side, Professor Maria Rosaria Ferrarese highlighted the role of the law firms in this field, portraiting them as the most important source of the legal standards which lex mercatoria is said to consist of. On the other side, other scholars, among them Professor Maurizio Lupoi, a renowned comparatist, pointed to corporate lawyers, who work for the most important multinational corporations, as the true inventors and framers of such standards. As can be seen in the index attached, my research project shall focus, first of all, on globalization from a socio-legal perspective, for globalization processes, as upheld by Prof. Gunther Teubner in his Economic Globalization and the Emergence of Lex Mercatoria, has seriously challenged the traditional hierarchy of legal rules, inherited from the XIX century, while making a number of non-state law sources flourish – as is usually said – in a space without frontiers. On these bases, I intend to venture into a synthetic reconstruction of lex mercatoria in a historic perspective, looking, amongst others, at the legal standards that were produced and respected in the late Middle Ages by those merchants who sought to avail themselves of a uniform law for their commercial transactions. Then I plan to analyze the new lex mercatoria in detail. At this stage of my research, I intend to understand what is lex mercatoria (doubts are recurrently raised about whether such thing actually exists), what are its purported characters, why numerous authors state that lex mercatoria is based on the principles of the common law and, finally, whether this set of standards really happens to be the new legal landscape which inspires legal transactions in both the common law and the civil law countries. A second part of my work should be devoted to the US legal profession, with an eye, especially, to what has been termed as mega-lawyering and the role of big law firms. Law firms originated in the USA and are increasingly spreading out all over the world, not only because American firms are opening their branches in foreign countries, but also because it is their model itself that is flourishing almost everywhere, including Italy. American law firms are usually very large companies where several hundreds lawyers group in a rigid hierarchical order (partners and associates) and work together on behalf of first class clients, especially big corporations, covering all legal fields, from consultancy to litigation, from criminal law to bankruptcy law, antitrust law, etc. In this chapter, I plan to describe US law schools, bar exams and the American legal profession in its current shape. My attention should especially focus on the structure of the law firms, their hierarchy, pro bono activities, diversity policies, etc. The last part of my research should be empirical. As said above, my purpose is to understand who really creates lex mercatoria, which is said to be spreading all over the world alongside with globalization processes and, more generally, which role is really played by first class lawyers, either private counsellors or corporate figures, in the field of international and transnational business.