User blog comment:Captain Dashing/Is the Pirate's Code still in Effect?/@comment-4898132-20111015041207/@comment-3106883-20111016130124

I don't have Price of Freedom, so I don't know how it's used, but "Brethren of the Coast" sounds like a general name for the Pirates. Brethren Court refers specifically to the meeting of all nine Pirate Lords as a governing body.

More on topic, the authority of the Court didn't rest on its binding of Calypso, it rested on the fact that the Nine Pirate Lords were powerful enough, as a group, to do something like that, trapping a heathen goddess in a single form. A Pirate captain like Blackbeard might perhaps have had enough magical power and arrogance to defy the Pirate Lords, but an ordinary captain would not. Even Barbossa seems to have obeyed the Code most of the time.