Private Commercial Law in the Cotton Industry: Creating Cooperation Through Rules, Norms, and Institutions
Private Commercial Law in the Cotton Industry: Creating Cooperation Through Rules, Norms, and Institutions
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棉花行业的私商法：通过规则、规范和制度建立合作
DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.281437
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发表时间：
2001
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Lisa E. Bernstein
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Lisa E. Bernstein
棉花行业几乎完全选择退出公共法律体系，代之以最古老、最复杂的私人商法体系之一。大多数商人之间或商人与工厂之间的国内棉花购销合同既没有根据《统一商法典》签订，也没有在出现争议时在法庭上解释和执行。相反，大多数此类合同是根据几套私人起草的合同违约规则之一签订的，并须在几个商业法庭之一进行仲裁。同样，大多数棉花国际销售既不受国家规定的法律规则的约束，也不受《国际货物销售公约》的约束，而是受利物浦棉花协会的规则约束。本文通过对棉花行业合同关系的详细案例研究，探讨构成该行业私人法律体系（“PLS”）的规则、规范和制度如何为交易者创造价值。首先描述了 PLS 的正式运作，并讨论了其实体规则、裁决方法和仲裁程序如何改进《统一商法典》和公共法律体系所规定的规则。然后描述了棉花行业机构为加强贸易的社会和信息基础设施而采取的许多步骤，并分析了这些努力如何结合起来使基于声誉的非法律制裁成为该行业的强大力量。然后，本文借鉴这一讨论表明，此类制裁的可用性可能使交易者能够创建增值的合同治理结构，如果他们的交易受公共法律体系管辖，那么这种结构可能无法实现或成本过高。本文还详细讨论了该行业如何努力支持承包关系的法律和法外方面，以及棉花机构的某些其他特征，如何成功地创造了有利于合作承包关系的建立、维持和恢复的条件。最后，它建议了解棉花行业的机构如何为交易者创造价值可能有助于确定私营机构可以在支持贸易方面发挥积极作用的其他行业和其他环境。
The cotton industry has almost entirely opted out of the public legal system, replacing it with one of the oldest and most complex systems of private commercial law. Most contracts for the purchase and sale of domestic cotton, between merchants or between merchants and mills, are neither consummated under the Uniform Commercial Code nor interpreted and enforced in court when disputes arise. Rather, most such contracts are concluded under one of several privately drafted sets of contract default rules and are subject to arbitration in one of several merchant tribunals. Similarly, most international sales of cotton are governed neither by state-supplied legal rules, nor by the Convention on the International Sale of Goods, but rather by the rules of the Liverpool Cotton Association. This Article draws on a detailed case study of contractual relations in the cotton industry to examine the ways that the rules, norms and institutions that constitute the industry's private legal system ("PLS") create value for transactors. It begins by describing the formal operation of the PLS and discussing the ways that its substantive rules, adjudicative approaches and arbitral procedures improve on those provided by the Uniform Commercial Code and the public legal system. It then describes the many steps taken by cotton industry institutions to strengthen the social and informational infrastructures of trade and analyzes how these efforts combine to make reputation-based nonlegal sanctions a powerful force in the industry. The paper then draws on this discussion to suggest that the availability of such sanctions may enable transactors to create value-enhancing contract governance structures that might be either unavailable or prohibitively expensive if their transactions were governed by the public legal system. The paper also discusses in great detail how the industry's efforts to support the legal and extralegal aspects of contracting relationships, together with certain other features of cotton institutions, have succeeded in creating conditions that are conducive to the creation, maintenance and restoration of cooperative contracting relationships. It concludes by suggesting that understanding how the cotton industry's institutions create value for transactors may help identify other industries and other contexts in which private institutions can play a positive role in supporting trade.