Examines Coke's impact on the regulation of the legal profession and argues that while he opposed royal grants of monopoly privileges, his efforts tended to enhance monopoly advantages of common law barristers
[The law merchant] was a special body of commercial law administered in merchant courts, which had emerged in the Middle Ages, and continued to appeal to many merchant-litigants despite its gradual decline ... [It] primarily involved judgments by private arbitration. In 1606, Coke ... ruled that the law merchant was ... part of the common law, and that the decisions of merchant courts could be reversed by common law courts. Bruce Benson quotes Leon Trakman ... as concluding that as a result "merchant courts ... were abolished, or alternatively, they were integrated into the common law system."