Plan A for addressing the Greek debt crisis has taken the form of a €110 billion financial support package for Greece announced by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund on May 2, 2010. A significant part of that €110 billion, if and when it is disbursed, will be used to...

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...

This essay highlights a phenomenon that has no place in the conventional theory of sophisticated business contracts: the term that makes no sense as an enforceable promise, one that defies functional explanation, one that drafters blush to rationalize in retrospect or chalk up to honest mistake....

Conventional wisdom is that sovereigns will rarely, if ever, default on their external debts in circumstances where it is clear that they have the capacity to pay. The first line of defense against the errant sovereign is its concern about reputation. It may have to tap the external debt markets...

The role of the Official Sector institutions as lenders in crisis situations has evolved over time, and, particularly in the context of the current euro area debt crisis, into something akin to a lender of last resort. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund regularly provide...

Research on the law and economics of contract typically analyzes the explicit pricing of the contract terms in a debt contract by modeling a bilateral debtor-creditor relationship, a framework we call the “classical model.” Under this model, contract terms that affect the debtor's repayment...

One of the most debated issues in international finance is the meaning of the pari passu clause in sovereign bonds. The clause is ubiquitous; it is in almost every single foreign-law sovereign bond out there. Yet, almost no one seems to agree on its meaning. One way to cut the Gordian knot is to...

The standard model of judicial behavior suggests that judges primarily care about deciding cases in ways that further their political ideologies. But judicial behavior seems much more complex. Politicians who nominate people for judgeships do not typically tout their ideology (except sometimes...

A meeting of international finance and insolvency experts was held on November 2, 2013 at the Annenberg House in Santa Monica, California. The meeting was co-hosted by the USC Law School and the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands. The goal was to solicit the views of experts on the implications of...