The academic literature on sovereign debt largely assumes that law has little role to play. Indeed, the primary question addressed by the literature is why sovereigns repay at all given the irrelevance of legal enforcement. But if law, and specifically contract law, does not matter, how to...

Constitutions often contain rules that are meant to constrain the behavior of future governments during crises. Anti-discrimination rules and protections against expropriation of private property are classic examples. But when crisis hits, politicians are typically tempted by their short-run...

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...

Emerging market sovereigns issue bonds in the international capital markets governed by a foreign legal regime such as the law of England or New York State. European sovereigns, however, have been able to issue bonds governed by the issuer's own law. In the event of a future financial crisis,...

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist,...

For over a century, legal scholars have debated the question of what to do about the debts incurred by despotic governments; asking whether successor non-despotic governments should have to pay them. That debate has gone nowhere. This paper examines whether an Op Ed written by Harvard economist,...

This Article tests for the presence of bias in judicial citations within federal circuit court opinions. Our findings suggest bias along three dimensions. First, judges base outside circuit citation decisions in part on the political party of the cited judge. Judges tend to cite judges of the...

In securities-fraud cases, courts routinely admonish plaintiffs that they are not permitted to rely on allegations of quot;fraud by hindsight.quot; In effect, courts disfavor plaintiffs' use of evidence of bad outcomes to support claims of securities fraud. Disfavoring hindsight evidence appears...

In April 2002 the International Monetary Fund introduced a sovereign bankruptcy proposal only to be rebuffed by the United States Treasury. Where the IMF wanted a mandatory bankruptcy regime, the Treasury wanted to solve distress problems with contractual devices. Sovereign bondholders and...

The external debt of emerging market sovereign borrowers is now mainly in the form of bonds held by thousands of institutional and individual bondholders. Many of these bonds are governed by the law of the State of New York. As a matter of drafting convention, New York law-governed bonds for...