The societal mega-trends of the past four decades, such as a globalizing economy and an aging society, have challenged the understanding of the state in OECD countries. The resulting “transformations of the state” are the subject of an interdisciplinary research agenda established at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 597 in Bremen, Germany. A total of twenty projects from political science, law, and economics explore changes of statehood which take place in two different dimensions: first, the internationalization and, second, the privatization of activities and functions which were traditionally performed by and ascribed to the democratic, constitutional and interventionist state. While the first research phase (2003-2006) aimed at founding empirical descriptions of these internationalization and privatization processes, the current phase (2007-2010) is dedicated to explaining the observed changes in statehood. Within this general framework, the authors’ research project on “New Forms of Legal Certainty in Globalized Exchange Processes” deals with changes in the institutional organization of commerce.

Markets need a complex set of institutions in order to work properly. Within a state, the national legal order with its legal rules, courts, and enforcement agencies have the task of fulfilling this role. Besides safeguarding property rights, the national legal order encompasses (1) the facilitating of market transactions by offering enabling (facilitative) law (as legal standard solutions) and helping private parties to enforce contracts within the domain of freedom of contract, and (2) the regulation of market transactions for solving or mitigating market failures problems and achieving other policy objectives. A comparable consistent legal system is missing on the international level for ensuring the working of global markets and the governance of cross-border transactions. However, the dynamic process of globalization has brought about the development of a number of new institutional solutions for solving these problems. The most prominent issue is the regulation of international markets (“global governance”). This article, however, will focus on the evolution of institutions for the enforcement of contracts for cross-border transactions between firms. Although there have always been institutional solutions for the governance of cross-border contracts (lex mercatoria), in recent years, a number of new governance solutions for the enforcement of cross-border transactions have emerged (“transnational commercial law”). The increasing use of choice of law, private governance instead of private law (provided by states), and private arbitration instead of public courts are the most important characteristics of this development. This also includes hybrids as new combinations between private and public solutions for the governance of cross-border contracts. Therefore, the process of globalization is accompanied and enabled by a complex process of institutional evolution.

Institutions can have a decisive impact on economic performance. The law is particularly important in shaping the institutional framework for economic activities. Legal rules can be viewed as socio-technological devices used to help individuals solve the coordination problems and conflicts that arise in an environment of scarce resources. In such an environment, the law affects both the allocation as well as the distribution of resources, and is itself influenced and altered by economic evolution. However, our understanding of the determinants and mechanisms of legal change from an economic perspective remains rather weak.

Globalization and the rules it generates confront legal scholarship with a number of intricate issues. One of these lies at the core of a hypothesis which has been debated for some time in the literature. According to this hypothesis, the legal vacuum left by nation states in the institutional organization of cross-border commerce has been filled by a variety of private governance mechanisms, with the result that regulatory responsibility has been taken over by private or hybrid actors. Testing this proposition requires analytical tools capable of discriminating between private ordering and public law-making. The private, or hybrid, governance regimes that would seem to be the hallmark of what is slowly emerging as global law are a Byzantine mixture of legal and social norms. Because of this, the foremost problem to be solved is that of deciding where to draw the line between legal and non-legal norms. Only if there are unequivocal criteria for distinguishing between law and non-law does it become possible to comprehend how hybrid regimes arise and evolve within the globalization process and, thus, to determine whether private actors have in fact assumed regulatory responsibility.

This contribution aims to apply some insights from evolutionary theory to transnational commercial law and to the harmonisation of private law in the European Union. By doing so, it hopes to provide a fresh perspective to the theoretical underpinning of the development of both transnational commercial law and European private law. For transnational commercial law, it has already been well explained that the transformation of the role of the State led to new forms of governance. If there was previously a State monopoly on providing legal certainty and enforcement mechanisms, today the goods of legal certainty and enforcement are often provided by others rather than the State institutions, in particular in cross-border transactions. In European private law, an organic development – in which the role of the national States is also rather limited – is the most likely way to create a successful unified law. Both developments raise many questions. This contribution only aims at providing a framework to deal with one of these questions: how to explain (or even predict) the evolution of law beyond the State (of which transnational commercial law and European private law are important examples)? If legal development can no longer be explained by positivist or natural law thinking, can evolutionary theory fill the gap?

The various contributions to this theme issue are likely to have at least two (non-trivial) things in common. First, they aim to contribute to a research project on “Legal certainty for globalized exchange processes” and to the latter's attempts to explain the observed transformation “towards the transnationalization of commercial law, which is understood as a combination of the internationalization and privatization of the responsibility of the state for the production of the normative good of legal certainty for global commerce”. Secondly, they aim to fulfill this task by making use of “evolutionary theory” or, as it was again expressed in the original conference announcement, by dealing with “a theoretical perspective that gives some substance to the meaning of the term “evolution” with regard to law, social organization, and the state”. Since, as I will try to explain shortly, my own particular take on this – it would appear – relatively small set of commonalities involves more specifically the use of contemporary evolutionary approaches to human behavior. I must admit to having been surprised that no one else seemed to have much use for these approaches in their respective takes on the problems that united us in the conference from which this contribution stems. After all, what better use to make of a theory originating from biology than to elucidate the biological underpinnings of our behavior and its underlying psychological mechanisms as they relate to law and legally relevant phenomena? Perhaps some of the reasons for these at first sight, striking differences in opinion on which “evolutionary theory” to make use of, or what meaning to impinge upon the term “evolution” will become clearer in the pages that follow, offering ways in which eventually to combine them. Or perhaps the two things we had in common when we started out will be all there is left to look at in the end.

Evolutionary theories have always been treated by legal scholars as a sort of cousin to the legal theoretical family, both in Europe and the United States. They are nice theories, they tell interesting stories, you sometimes listen to what they have to say and when among friends, you may even quote them. However, in the modern mononuclear family, when it is time to tackle important issues and reach important decisions, or simply to celebrate some success stories, these cousins are often left outside the door, being simply “relatives” and not part of the legal family in the proper sense. A former evolutionary scholar strikingly stated in a manner that can be seen as representative of the general skepticism towards the evolutionary approach of a large segment of the legal family, “Legal scholarship should not be so timid as to depend on others for its theoretical models. We might take our inspiration where we find it, but we should build our theories within our own discipline, constrained only by the data that defines it and the criteria of quality appropriate to it.” The main objective of this article is to take the first step towards making evolutionary theory “our own discipline,” by elevating evolutionary theory from the status of “cousin” to one of “sibling” (or at least “in-laws”) of the legal family. The focus in particular is to understand why, despite the fact that the evolutionary theory approach to law (or “evolutionary theory and law”) has been present quite a while in the legal scholar's discussion, the legal world at large has left it at the front step of the legal house. Based on this analysis, the task is also to evaluate whether it is possible, after certain adjustments, to invite evolutionary theory into the larger family of legal thinking, in particular as part of the legal theories of law-making (as “legal evolutionary theory”).