In The Financial Courts, Jo Braithwaite analyses thirty years of cases involving the global derivatives markets, exploring the nature of these legal disputes and assessing their impact on financial markets and on commercial law more broadly. Weaving together this substantial body of cases with theoretical insights drawn from the growing literature on the internationalisation of financial law, Braithwaite offers readers a detailed and highly original contribution to the debate about the role of private law in international financial markets. This important work should be read by lawyers, economists and regulators in the field.
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.
The question of adjudication in international financial law has rarely been analysed comprehensively in the legal literature. This can probably be explained with the fact that, unlike in other areas of international economic law, there is no international financial court specifically designed to adjudicate international disputes between financial regulators, or between governments and financial institutions or investors. Moreover, the informality of regulatory cooperation through Transnational Regulatory Networks (TRNs), the use of soft laws to regulate international financial relations, and the presence of prudential carve-outs in international treaties was supposed to keep financial supervisory and regulatory authorities free from international scrutiny and to limit the judicial review of regulatory measures to a purely domestic exercise. Yet, financial measures are increasingly challenged in international investment tribunals, human rights courts, and regional courts. From 1995 to 2016, there have been more than 100 known international disputes on financial services, of which roughly two-thirds involved a supervisory measure such as the resolution or bankruptcy of an insolvent bank or the imposition of supervisory fines. The remaining claims mostly included violation of sovereign debt contracts, or emergency legislation affecting financial services. Investment arbitration's, in particular, are considerably on the rise. The increased number of regulatory disputes represents fundamental implications for the financial regulatory community in terms of domestic governance, regulatory cooperation, and global financial stability. This essay empirically investigates and maps for the first time the patterns of international adjudication in financial law, and comments on what the rise of international litigation means for the global financial architecture.
Explains the legal implications of internationalisation, standardisation and diversification in modern derivatives markets, demonstrating the key role of national courts.
RAND Corporation researchers surveyed experts from five states that use a variety of approaches to funding state court systems to assess financing, accounting, and governance issues under various systems.
Over seven million Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, with their criminal records often following them for life and affecting access to higher education, jobs, and housing. Court-ordered monetary sanctions that compel criminal defendants to pay fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution further inhibit their ability to reenter society. In A Pound of Flesh, sociologist Alexes Harris analyzes the rise of monetary sanctions in the criminal justice system and shows how they permanently penalize and marginalize the poor. She exposes the damaging effects of a little-understood component of criminal sentencing and shows how it further perpetuates racial and economic inequality. Harris draws from extensive sentencing data, legal documents, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defendants, judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. She documents how low-income defendants are affected by monetary sanctions, which include fees for public defenders and a variety of processing charges. Until these debts are paid in full, individuals remain under judicial supervision, subject to court summons, warrants, and jail stays. As a result of interest and surcharges that accumulate on unpaid financial penalties, these monetary sanctions often become insurmountable legal debts which many offenders carry for the remainder of their lives. Harris finds that such fiscal sentences, which are imposed disproportionately on low-income minorities, help create a permanent economic underclass and deepen social stratification. A Pound of Flesh delves into the court practices of five counties in Washington State to illustrate the ways in which subjective sentencing shapes the practice of monetary sanctions. Judges and court clerks hold a considerable degree of discretion in the sentencing and monitoring of monetary sanctions and rely on individual values—such as personal responsibility, meritocracy, and paternalism—to determine how much and when offenders should pay. Harris shows that monetary sanctions are imposed at different rates across jurisdictions, with little or no state government oversight. Local officials’ reliance on their own values and beliefs can also push offenders further into debt—for example, when judges charge defendants who lack the means to pay their fines with contempt of court and penalize them with additional fines or jail time. A Pound of Flesh provides a timely examination of how monetary sanctions permanently bind poor offenders to the judicial system. Harris concludes that in letting monetary sanctions go unchecked, we have created a two-tiered legal system that imposes additional burdens on already-marginalized groups.
