What is Commercial Law - ANU College of Law - .DOCVIP

What is Commercial Law? Stephen Bottomley Director, Centre for Commercial Law Paper presented to “Challenges to Commercial Law” Conference 17 September 2001 Centre for Commercial Law Faculty of Law The Australian National University Introduction I will begin with the conclusion – I am not going to provide a definitive answer to the question posed in the title to this paper, although I think that I can do better than one dictionary definition of commercial law as being “Areas of law having particular relevance to commerce and commercial transactions”. I am not concerned about the lack of a definitive answer, because I am not asking the question in the hope or expectation that one exists. Instead, I ask the question because I think that it might prompt some useful reflections and pose some problems which commercial lawyers (however the membership of that ‘group’ is defined), ought to be thinking about. I should also acknowledge that the question, and its use as a topic for a seminar paper, is not original. In 1997 Justice Roger Giles addressed the annual general meeting of the Commercial Law Association in Sydney with a paper titled “Commercial Law – What is it?”. Justice Giles arrived at the following conclusion: “So what is commercial law? It’s almost anything. It goes much beyond the regulation of the relationships between merchants and traders, and it goes beyond those parts of the law most commonly associated with business activities in that all major and fundamental areas of law are now commonly associated with business activities.” This passage suggests a number of things. It suggests that there is a connection of some type between commercial law and business activity. It suggests that the boundaries of commercial law are not easily defined. It hints that this definitional problem may be due to shifting commercial practices, and to shifting legal responses to those practices. This latter idea – that commercial law is in a state of change