Intra-Firm Trade Law: Contract Enforcement and Dispute Resolution in Transnational Corporations

What is intra-firm trade law? In this article we propose that intra-firm trade law is a branch of transnational commercial law. Transnational commercial law, in turn, is a concept related to interdisciplinary legal studies which focuses on the question of how modern trade is institutionally organised in practice, and what role law plays in this context (Calliess et al., 2007). The formulation of this question contains a number of implications for the analysis of commercial law: First, following New Institutional Economics (Furubotn & Richter, 2005; Williamson, 2008) instead of the legal concept of contract, the generic term of transaction, as known also from the US Uniform Commercial Code, takes centre stage. Second, the main emphasis is on the analysis of cross-border transactions since the foreign trade-to-Gross-Domestic-Product (GDP) ratio of Germany, for example, reached an all-time high of 75.9 per cent in 2012.1 And third, in terms of methodology a functional-empirical approach to the topic includes, apart from legal, also alternative forms of governance as being of paramount importance (Calliess & Zumbansen, 2010).