(also business law, mercantile law), an independent body of law in a number of bourgeois countries regulating, along with civil law, commercial and private affairs. In countries with special commercial codes (France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Japan), there is a distinction between commercial law and civil law.
Commercial law arose in the Middle Ages along with the development of international trade in the Mediterranean area and was referred to as the law merchant (lex mercatorid). It took shape as a body of customary rules and principles relating to merchants and mercantile transactions and was fixed in city statutes or statutes of merchant guilds. Among the early collections of these rules and principles were the Ragusa Statutes and the Rhodian Sea Law. In certain countries, such as Germany, the codification of commercial legislation preceded that of civil legislation.
In countries where it forms a separate body of jurisprudence, commercial law regulates the activities of business associations and sets forth procedures for the registration of business associations and the keeping of such records as journals. It also deals with questions of agency, the circulation of securities (checks, notes, stock certificates), and procedures governing commercial transactions and the dissolution of business associations, in particular, declarations of bankruptcy.
As capitalism has developed, the rules of civil and commercial law have in practice come to be applied to the same relations; as a result, the two branches have been unified in a number of countries (Sweden, Italy) in a single legislative act—a civil code or a code of obligations. In the United States, the development of the rules regulating capitalist business dealings took a different direction. There, a federal civil code does not exist. On the initiative of interested business circles, the Uniform Commercial Code was drawn up and approved by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, the American Law Institute, and the American Bar Association. Published in 1957, this unofficial code has served as the basis for the official codification of commercial legislation in all states except Louisiana.