Mandatory arbitration has engendered a significant amount of debate, much of which focuses on the proper response the law should make to "one-sided" clauses - i.e., those that restrict the remedies and procedures available to individuals in arbitration. But how do we identify one-sided clauses?...

A growing body of empirical research explores the use of arbitration to resolve employment disputes, typically by comparing arbitration to litigation using relatively traditional outcome measures: who wins, how much, and how quickly. On the whole, this research suggests that employees fare...

The law of foreign sovereign immunity changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century. The United States abandoned the doctrine of absolute immunity and opened its courts to lawsuits by private claimants against foreign governments and officials. It also pursued a range of other...

This article presents a computer-assisted analysis of the first large-scale mass litigation of sovereign debt claims. Between 2002 and 2016, hundreds of lawsuits were filed against Argentina in the United States, virtually all in the Southern District of New York. Historically, litigation...

The literature on sovereign debt treats law as of marginal significance, largely because the doctrine of sovereign immunity leaves creditors few potent legal remedies against sovereign borrowers. Although sovereign debts can indeed by hard to enforce, the goal of this Essay is to demonstrate...

The 20th century witnessed a transformative, “tectonic” shift in international law, from “absolute” to “restrictive” theories of sovereign immunity. As conventionally understood, however, this dramatic transformation represented only a shift in the default rule. Under absolute...

Venezuela is in a severe economic crisis. An October 2016 debt swap bought some time for the beleaguered state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), but there remains speculation about default by both PDVSA and the government. The fact that Venezuela's economy is heavily...

Commercial databases now make available to paying clients information about the legal terms in sovereign loan contracts. This information is important to academic researchers, to policy institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, and to investors and other market actors. For a random...

During the European sovereign debt crisis of 2011-13, some nations faced with rising borrowing costs adopted commitments to treat bondholders as priority claimants. That is, if there was a shortage of funds, bondholders would be paid first. In this article, we analyze the prevalence and variety...

This paper examines the intersection between two fundamental attributes of Euro Area sovereign debt. The first is that sovereigns tend to issue bonds governed by their own law, which makes a debt restructuring comparatively easy. The second is the standardized collective action clause (CAC)...