Today's mobile executive would readily echo Voltaire's comment in 1838: 'Is it not an absurd and terrible thing that what is true in one village is false in another? What kind of barbarism is it that citizens must live under different laws? When you travel in this kingdom you change legal systems as often as you change horses.' A couple of centuries before Voltaire's time, there were thousands of jurisdictions in the world. But then of course people were much, much less mobile so the collisions of conflicting laws did not seem so drastic. In addition, the volume of contacts between people was a tiny proportion of those we have now. Even in the 18th century, the GDP of the entire world was equivalent to that of modern Australia or Turkey and the amount of law and regulation was also a tiny proportion of present-day volumes. There are now just under 200 sovereign states in the world divided into around 320 jurisdictions. Over the recent couple of decades, there has been a quite fantastic acceleration in the amount and complexity of legal systems. This has been driven by a number of important factors. The first is that nearly all the countries of the world are now part of the world economy. There are people who are interested even in Chad, even in Uzbekistan. Even Cambodia has a stock exchange. Only Bhutan, North Korea and perhaps a couple of others still stand loftily aside.
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