Few episodes in American political history have generated as much scholarship as the ‘Bank War’ between Andrew Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States. Economic historians have debated whether the bank was a central bank, its role as a monetary regulator, and the national economic consequences of its removal. Some argue that the bank exercised a significant influence over the nation's credit markets in the early antebellum decades, contributing to a consolidation of those markets; a trend which legal historians say was helped also by a federal judiciary sensitive to the needs of interstate business. Tony Freyer, for example, has explored the work of federal courts in the antebellum decades and concluded that those courts were instrumental in the formation of a body of commercial law that satisfied the needs of an expanding market economy.

As important as federal courts were in shaping a national commercial law, it is difficult to imagine a national institution that weighed so heavily on local markets as the Second Bank of the United States. Indeed, the bank as regulator of domestic exchanges, it can be argued, was the most significant national institution in the years before 1836, immersed in every important market and linking those markets together in a great national system.

In the ongoing debate over the commercialization of the common law to satisfy the expansive needs of a market economy, much of the scholarship has come to focus on negotiability and the transferability of contracts. Morton Horwitz writes: ‘[n]o development had a more shattering effect on American conceptions of the nature of contract than the necessity of forgoing a body of commercial law during the last decade of the eighteenth century.