Call for Papers

AALS Joint Program of the Financial Institutions & Consumer Financial Services Section and the European Law Section

Taking Stock of Post-Crisis Reforms: Local, Global, and Comparative Perspectives on Financial Sector Regulation

AALS Annual Meeting, January 3, 2014

New York, New York

    The AALS Section on Financial Institutions & Consumer Financial Services and Section on European Law are pleased to announce that they are sponsoring a Call for Papers for their joint program on Friday, January 3, at the AALS 2014 Annual Meeting in New York, New York.

    The topic of the program and call for papers is “Taking Stock of Post-Crisis Reforms: Local, Global, and Comparative Perspectives on Financial Sector Regulation.” The financial crisis of 2008 was truly a global crisis, and the world continues to face a wide range of post-crisis economic and political challenges. Today, several years after the market turmoil began, both the United States and the European Union are in the midst of major regulatory reforms in the financial services sector. The effects of these financial regulation reforms however, remain unclear. Structural reform in the U.S. is thus far limited to a yet-to-be finalized "Volcker Rule," while in the U.K. and the Eurozone, respectively, Vickers- and Liikanen-style "ring-fencing" remain incomplete if not inchoate. Debate in the U.S. still rages around whether and how smaller "community banks" should be regulated differently from megabanks, while the E.U. continues to debate whether to form a "banking union" at all and, if so, what it might or could entail, given various political constraints. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Reserve continues to innovate in the realm of monetary policy in the absence of functional fiscal policy, while the European Central Bank moves furtively toward acting as a full Fed-style central bank capable of backstopping sovereign debt instruments and providing real liquidity. Where might these multiple developments be ultimately heading, and what might the Americans and Europeans learn from each other as they grope tentatively forward? What broader implications do they raise for political accountability and legitimacy in a post-crisis world?

Form and length of submission

     The submissions committee looks forward to reviewing any papers that address the foregoing topics. While the preference will be given to papers with a clearly comparative focus, the committee’s overall goal is to select papers that will facilitate discussion of, and comparisons between, American and European approaches to various aspects of financial services regulation. Potential topics include macro-prudential regulation, consumer protection, monetary policy, regulation and supervision of financial intermediaries, structural reforms, and related issues of political accountability and legitimacy.

    Abstracts should be comprehensive enough to allow the committee to meaningfully evaluate the aims and likely content of papers they propose. Eligible law faculty are invited to submit manuscripts or abstracts dealing with any aspect of the foregoing topics. Untenured faculty members are particularly encouraged to submit manuscripts or abstracts.

    The initial review of the papers will be blind. Accordingly the author should submit a cover letter with the paper. However, the paper itself, including the title page and footnotes must not contain any references identifying the author or the author’s school. The submitting author is responsible for taking any steps necessary to redact self-identifying text or footnotes.

    Papers may be accepted for publication but must not be published prior to the Annual Meeting.

Deadline and submission method

    To be considered, papers must be submitted electronically to Saule Omarova at omarova@email.unc.edu and Peter Lindseth at peter.lindseth@law.uconn.edu.

    The deadline for submission is September 3, 2013.

    Papers will be selected after review by members of a Committee appointed by the Chairs of the two sections. The authors of the selected papers will be notified by September 30, 2013.

    The Call for Paper participants will be responsible for paying their annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

Eligibility

    Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. The following are ineligible to submit: foreign, visiting (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school) and adjunct faculty members, graduate students, fellows, non-law school faculty, and faculty at fee-paid non-member schools. Papers co-authored with a person ineligible to submit on their own may be submitted by the eligible co-author.

    Please forward this Call for Papers to any eligible faculty who might be interested.

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So I've been fascinated by the Cyprus story, ignorant though I am of many of the details.    If you're like me on one or the other count (ignorance or fascination), check out our friends at Credit Slip:

Anna Gelpern on

The inevitable interconnectedness of banks and governments

Adam Levitin on

the possibility of more EU bank runs 

whether the deposit tax would have been worth it (answer: no)

what happened to absolute priority

Stephen Lubben on how not to do a bailout

More than anything, I keep picturing myself as a depositor with less than 100,000 euros in my "guaranteed" account, looking at an overnight "tax" that strips me of 6.75%of my holdings.  I would not be happy.

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While Americans worry that there isn't enough accountablility being imposed on banks for the financial crisis, the Times observes that European banks are forking over billions in penalties to their regulators.  LIBOR is one thing, there's an insurance product that is causing no end of headaches, and:

European banks are expected to pay a total of about $25 billion for settlements and client compensation, so far. HSBC has to write the biggest check, paying $1.9 billion for lapses in its anti-money laundering controls. (A number of banks, however, have made provisions for potentially larger amounts.)

ING Bank, part of the Dutch financial giant ING Group, reached a $619 million settlement for allegation of sanction violations in June. Standard Chartered, based in London, agreed to pay a total of $667 million in two separate money-laundering claim settlements in August and December.

To be sure, American regulators haven't exactly eased off on sanctioning boycott avoiders.  But this action in Europe is all worth keeping an eye on, if only for the possibility that financial regulation could go the way of antitrust or accounting, where global standards are set by European regulators.  It is too soon to suggest that something like this is happening yet, and there is a great deal of work being done on harmonizing global standards so that European rules do not get applied extraterritorially.  But it isn't outside the realm of possibility.

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I'm pleased to be a part of the organizing committee for this second research forum, which I very much hope will include a strong contingent of international economic papers law papers.  To apply, you need only complete an abstract.  The call is reprinted below, please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions:

Second Annual American Society of International Law Research Forum

October 20-21, 2012, Athens, GA

The American Society of International Law calls for submissions of scholarly paper proposals for the ASIL Research Forum to be held at the University of Georgia School of Law on October 20-21, 2012.

The Research Forum, a Society initiative introduced in 2011, aims to provide a setting for the presentation and focused discussion of works-in-progress by Society members. All ASIL members are invited to attend the Forum, whether presenting a paper or not.

Interested participants should submit an abstract (no more than 500 words in length) summarizing the scholarly paper to be presented at the Forum. Papers can be on any topic related to international and transnational law and should be unpublished (for purposes of the call, publication to an electronic database such as SSRN is not considered publication). Interdisciplinary projects, empirical studies, and jointly authored papers are welcome. Member proposals should be submitted online here by April 15. Proposals will include 1) the name, institutional affiliation, professional position, and contact information for the author(s), and 2) an abstract. Review of the abstracts will be blind, and therefore abstracts should not include any identifying information about the author. Abstracts containing identifying information will not be reviewed. Proposals will be vetted by the Research Forum Committee with selections to be announced by July 15

At present, it is the intent of the Research Forum Committee to organize the selected paper proposals around common issues, themes, and approaches. Discussants, who will comment on the papers, will be assigned to each cluster of papers. All authors will be required to submit a draft paper four weeks before the Research Forum. The expectation is that drafts will be posted on the Research Forum website.

The 2012 ASIL Research Forum Committee:

Laura Dickinson (George Washington), Co-Chair

Timothy Meyer (Georgia), Co-Chair

Jose Alvarez (NYU)

Laurence Helfer (Duke)

Hari Osofsky (Minnesota)

Kal Raustiala (UCLA)

David Zaring (Wharton)

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Something close to a plurality of corporate scholars are working on papers related to the financial crisis in the United States.  I think it is much less likely that we will see something similar with the potentially even more dramatic European financial crisis.  Here's why:

• A lot of what is happening in Europe is politics and markets, not law.  For sovereign debt, lawyers put together the instruments, and creditors can in theory (but not in practice) sue on default.  Ditto for the credit default swaps.  But the decisions about whether to issue them, whether to buy them... those aren't legal decisions, they are market ones. And they are the ones of interest in the crisis.
• Similarly, the decision to bail out Greece isn't a matter of a European agency acting creatively.  Instead, every member of the EU passed a law permitting a bailout.  Again, there's not much to chew on there in terms of administrative law.
• Of course, it isn't like there is no law to apply.  What the EU and the ECB do is governed by law ... but that's European law, it's hard, and I doubt American academics will have much to say about it.
• There are some questions of interest, of course.  Consider MF Global’s bankruptcy filing, which has some stuff on how its exposure to European debt wasn’t working for its regulators or Moody’s.  Might be something interesting there for lawyers.  But generally, I'm not holding my breath.
• I predict the sovereign debt experts in the academy - your Gulatis and your Gelperns - will have plenty of wisdom to impart, by the way.  But that's only a smidge of the corporate law academy, rather than, like, most of it.

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• Daniel Drezner argues that Europe is likely to come out of the current crisis pursuing even more integration, and I must say, I'm betting on that as well.  It's all well and good to decry the loss of control over monetary policy that the Euro represents, but it's also quite the form of status quo bias (and the decrying is the province of the always far-seeing macroeconomists, for that matter).  In fact, I can't really see how seeking the Euro breakup is different than arguing that Massachusetts ought to be able to mint its own fiat Romneys, or whatever, oh, and also reinstall border controls and implement free trade policies with other states in its own unique fashion.  And if that seems silly, why would Portugal want to do the same thing?
• Stephen Bainbridge is now distinguished, and not just by his impressive holiday recipes.
• And Brian Galle opens what - as he himself will tell you - is a sure to be transfixing series of posts on unemployment insurance, which I'm sure he seeks to own the way I own American foreign investment regulation.

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This afternoon, I attended an excellent session at the Law & Society Annual Meeting entitled "Integration Through Law in the European Union." The panelists are members of this discussion group at the European University Institute. My former Wisconsin colleague, Dave Trubek, noted in response to the presentations that all of the panelists seemed to agree on one point: something unique is happening with EU law (or, in Dave's words, "the EU is a different animal, not like anything else we have ever studied"), and the challenge is to figure it out.

That seems right to me, and it's the reason I have long been drawn to the subject. (Though I have never published on EU law, that will finally change next year, as I am helping the BYU Law Review to organize a symposium on legal origins.) When I was in law school in the late 1980s, I took several classes on the European Community at Chicago, and we had a very naive view of integration. The word "harmonization" is used in Europe, but what does that mean? That all national laws would be identical, marching in lockstep with directives from Brussels? That didn't happen in the late 1980s, and it certainly isn't happening now.

What are the implications for corporate law? More about that in some future posts ...

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Donald Tusk of the Civic Platform Party will become the new prime minister of Poland, ousting Jaroslaw Kaczynski of the Law and Justice Party. Even if you don't follow Polish politics, you may recall the prominent role played by the Kaczynski twins (Jaroslaw and his brother, Lech, who remains as Poland's President) in disrupting last summer's negotiations over a new treaty for the European Union.

Poland's people favor Europe much more than the Kaczynski twins, and it appears that Poles are tired of the divisive leaders, who rode into office on a platform of "fighting corruption, exposing communist-era collaborators, and helping those who felt left out by reforms that transformed Poland into a capitalist economy 18 years ago." In contrast, Tusk and the Civic Platform Party are focused on the future, with promises of free-market reforms.

Exit polls suggest that the Civic Platform Party will come away with over 40% of the vote, but in the absence of an absolute majority, the Civic Platform Party will form a coalition government with the Polish Peasants Party. So the pro-business party will join with the party of the peasants, having defeated law and justice?

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The Labor Department released its monthly unemployment figures today. Here is a graphical representation of recent rates from the W$J:

Notice that the line is plunging from 5.5% in 2004. Much of Europe wouldn't even appear on this scale. Since 2004, unemployment in Germany and France, using U.S. concepts, has gone from over 10% to roughly 9%. See here.

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During my recent trip to Brussels and Berlin for the Fulbright German Studies Seminar, the German Press Officer in Brussels was asked by one of our group to name the best sources for news about the European Union. In response, he first opined that most national newspapers (such as Le Monde or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) were parochial and failed to capture a European view of most stories. Indeed, he argued that this was one of the major obstacles to popular support for the EU among the people of Europe.

In the end, however, he identified one publication that offered an appropriately European view. Can you guess what it is? (The answer is below the fold.)

I suspect that some of you were thinking of The Economist, but his answer was the Financial Times.

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