Can popular sovereignty and sovereign territory co-exist? Can we imagine a world in which sovereignty territory could, like property, be traded among countries while still respecting people's interest in self-determination? What if countries' right to territorial integrity were predicated on a...

A body of empirical research in finance has attempted to assess whether stocks associated with sinful behavior (companies selling alcohol, tobacco, gambling activities, etc.) suffer from a market penalty. This question has been less studied in the sovereign bond market, but there is some...

In 1898, in the wake of the Spanish-American war, Spain ceded the colony of Cuba to the United States. In keeping with the law of state succession, the Spanish demanded that the U.S. also take on Spanish debts that had been backed by Cuban revenues. The Americans refused, arguing that some of...

The claim that lawyers act as gatekeepers or certifiers in financial transactions is widely discussed in the legal literature. There has, however, been little empirical examination of the claim. In this article, we test the hypothesis that law firms have replaced investment banks as the...

Sovereign debt problems were once thought to be a third world affliction. They still are. But as events of the last two years have shown, undisciplined sovereign borrowing - and the complacent lending that it requires - is not exclusively a third world problem. For the first time in living...