ABSTRACT
Latin has lately seen a surprising comeback as a legal language, at least when it comes to christening new fields of international law. There is now talk of Lex Digitalis, Lex Petrolea, Lex Sportiva and the like, and, as mother of them all, a ‘new’ Lex Mercatoria 1 – new because supposedly there already existed a Lex Mercatoria in the sense of a universal, autonomous merchant law in the Middle Ages. 2 While the tags of the smaller of these new fields – Latin or not – do not seriously try to disguise their recent origin, the labelling of the ‘Lex Mercatoria’ does indeed serve to make those medieval roots more plausible. The same seems to be true for another of Lex Mercatoria’s daughters, the so-called Lex Maritima. 3 This is the subject to be treated here.
