Transactional and Commercial Law

Today, business lawyers design contracts, acquisition deals, and organizational structures. They also undertake more mundane work like arranging simple commercial transactions and helping clients navigate legal and business structures. Historians and legal scholars have illustrated the important role that modern transactional and commercial lawyers have played in developing structures that fuel economic activity, shape distribution, shift power, and shape day-to-day business. Despite the recognition of the importance of business lawyering to modern economic activity, the work of transactional and commercial lawyers has received relatively little attention outside of the twentieth century. This panel provides three case studies illustrating the diverse roles that transactional and commercial lawyers played in reinventing and operating structures essential to enterprise in an earlier period. Our papers range from an analysis of the development of early modern form contracting practices in England’s first business corporations, to a study of the financial work of lawyers in the late-eighteenth century, to an examination of the application of commercial law in the law of slave hiring. Our projects illustrate the way that transactional lawyers navigated between the boundaries of state and enterprise, shaping business structures and social possibilities. They highlight a transactional and commercial bar capable of reinventing basic legal structures but also entrenching preexisting inequalities. Finally, our panel highlights the the important role that business history can play in answering questions posed by legal scholars about persistent legal forms and institutions.