In the context of the demise of Greensill Capital, in this Spotlight article the authors consider the levels of protection afforded to sophisticated and retail investors and question whether existing rules can cope with the emergence of crowdfunding platforms that enable retail investors to invest in private companies.
13 June 2024Consumer protection is best achieved through legislation and regulation, not by diluting or departing from established principles of common law and equity. Where a particular social problem affecting consumers is identified, such as the proliferation of Authorised Push Payment fraud, changes in the regulatory rules can provide the solution, taking into account a full range of policy factors. Courts should resist the inclination to step in with solutions that may seem to provide justice on the facts of the particular case, but do injustice in the wider sense of undermining the certainty and predictability that a stable system of legal principles is there to provide.
03 June 2024In this Spotlight article Guy Beringer considers the importance of legal platforms as valuable economic assets; he argues that this requires: (i) an understanding of the value that can accrue to an economy as a result of the efficiency of a legal platform; (ii) planning of the legal platform so that it keeps pace with development; and (iii) investment in the legal platform.
29 May 2024In this Spotlight article, the authors discuss the recent updates to the Sustainability-Linked Loan Principles (SLLPs) and the way in which the newly published Best Practice Guide (Guide) complements them, before examining how the market has incorporated ESG provisions into leveraged loans and the related issues that borrowers and lenders will need to consider.
28 May 2024This Spotlight article discusses the legal implications of financing Ukraine using immobilised Central Bank of Russia assets via loans or bonds backed by those assets or profits therefrom.
05 May 2024In this Spotlight article, Professor Seraina Grünewald considers how the macroprudential toolkit can be adapted to include climate-related risks.
18 April 2024This article considers whether, in light of recent case law, companies should reconsider how they effect assignments to be valid legal assignments under s 136 of the Law of Property Act 1925.
08 April 2024If the law is to recognise digital assets as property for private law purposes, then it would benefit from analysing them as composite things. The asset is more than mere data. It is a set of transactional functionalities. The most important of these is the capacity of the person who holds the private key to effect new transactions which will be recognised as valid by the technical rules of the system. Analysed in this way, the asset can be viewed as a specific transactional power over unique data entries on the ledger.
26 March 2024In this Spotlight article Thomas F Huertas considers the impact of sanctions on financial stability and their importance for national security. He posits that financial regulators need to consider how sanctions should be integrated into the financial system without inflicting collateral damage on it.
25 March 2024This Spotlight article argues that a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) ought to be regarded as having a constitutive law; that the rule of private international law to ascertain the constitutive law should be that it is the law with which the DAO has the closest and most real connection, objectively determined at the time of its creation; and that if English law is the constitutive law, a DAO should be held to be an unincorporated company (ie a species of large partnership).
25 March 2024