The judicial landscape in Europe for commercial litigation is changing rapidly. Many EU countries are establishing international business courts or have done so recently. Unmistakably, the approaching Brexit has had an effect on this development. In the last decades England and Wales – more precise, the Commercial Court in London - has built up a leading position as the most popular jurisdiction for resolving commercial disputes. The central question for the coming years will be what effect the new commercial courts in practice will have on the current dominance of English law and the leading position of the London court. In this article I address this question by focusing on the development of a new commercial court in the Netherlands: the Netherlands Commercial Court (NCC).

This article studies the significance of insights from non-legal disciplines (such as political science, economics, and sociology) for comparative legal research and the methodology connected with such ‘interdisciplinary contextualisation’. Based on a theoretical analysis concerning the nature and methodology of comparative law, the article demonstrates that contextualisation of the analysis of legal rules and case law is required for a meaningful comparison between legal systems. The challenges relating to this contextualisation are illustrated on the basis of a study of the judicial use of comparative legal analysis as a source of inspiration in the judgment of difficult cases. The insights obtained from the theoretical analysis and the example are combined in a final analysis concerning the role and method of interdisciplinary contextualisation in comparative legal analysis conducted by legal scholars and legal practitioners.