ABSTRACT
The purpose of the Commerce Clause has been noted as promoting national markets unimpeded by state barriers to trade and governed by uniform congressional regulation to remedy market failures. The law merchant, a body of international commercial law, also was utilized to resolve controversies over interstate and international private transactions. The power to make the substantive law in these areas was vested in Congress by the Commerce Clause. Admiralty, maritime and commercial law, and the conflict of laws were a highly integrated body of law. The application by federal courts of the traditional judicial practices of the law of nations would in no way invade that part of law reserved to the states by the structure of the Constitution and restated in the Tenth Amendment. The phrase "law of any state" in the Supremacy Clause must be compared with the language "laws of the several states" in Section 34 of the Judiciary Act.
