# Introduction (Vol. 2 No. 2) **URL:** **Published:** June 1, 1983 --- “Merchants were at liberty to trade and to adjudicate their disputes as they saw fit.” In this issue, we are very pleased to publish Leon Trakman’s introduction to _The Law Merchant_. Building upon the work of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. Hayek, Trakman considers the Law Merchant to be one of the best historical examples of the way in which a legal system develops out of customary practices and is able to adapt smoothly to changing economic and social circumstances. As he makes clear,, the Law Merchant owes its flexibility to an environment that is essentially free from the meddling and interferences of monarchs, parliaments, and bureaucrats. In the international sphere, where anarchy reigned de facto, no one state was powerful enough to impose its conception of what was legal on the rest, and so the freedom required for a spontaneous order to develop was present. Merchants were at liberty to trade and to adjudicate their disputes as they saw fit. The result was the development of a system of law that we now know as the “Law Merchant.” Unlike most modern historians of law, Trakman explicitly interprets the development of the Law Merchant within a theoretical framework based upon the idea of spontaneous ordering. A topic that he touches upon indirectly concerns the relationship between spontaneous legal orders and spontaneous social and economic orders. The precise nature of the relationship between these different spontaneous orders is a complex one and unfortunately there is no space here to go into any detail; however, one can say that the relationship is a reciprocal one. Changes in the definition of property rights and the degree to which they are legally protected profoundly influence political and economic activity. Conversely, changes in social and economic practice exert considerable pressure on the legal system and demand to be recognized explicitly in law. If the legal system is free enough to adapt and absorb changes, and the English, American, and postwar Western European systems appear to be, then these changes will be gradually and peacefully accommodated. On the other hand, if the legal system is not free enough to accommodate economic and social changes, then the result can be revolution and a radical and violent restructuring of the legal system and the property rights it enforces. These issues require much further thought and development if the nature of spontaneous orders, as well as the nature of modern revolutions, are to be fully understood. In our usual Crosscurrents section we bring your attention to some recent works on the revolutions taking place in Central America; the social and economic effects of war in nineteenth-century Europe and the opposition of liberals to its devastating consequences; Norman Barry’s writings on political philosophy; John Gray’s analysis of two giants of the classical liberal tradition, John Stuart Mill and Friedrich A. Hayek; and the recently-discovered environmental dangers of even a “limited” nuclear war.