The Globalization of Corporate Insolvency Regimes: Law, International Institutions, Professions, and Nation-States

American Bar Foundation, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This project provides an empirically-based theoretical interpretation of ways that powerful global institutions, whose internal and cooperative actions are usually invisible, set the global norms for business insolvencies. The researchers seek to understand how the rules of the game are set by financial and professional institutions in global centers and subsequently are negotiated in law-making by players in the peripheral national economies. This project extends prior work in several new directions: the social and network structuration of national markets to regional and global levels, the interplay among professionals, the state and financial institutions in struggles over property and jurisdictional rights in law-making, and lawyers and globalization. These themes are unified around developing a socio-legal theory of law-making that extends a theory of the recursivity of law to focus closely on the shift from law-in-action to law-on-the books. The researchers employ a research design with three elements: (1) they will contextualize present developments with a cross-sectional time-series data on political, social and economic change and bankruptcy reforms world-wide from 1973-1999; (2) they will continue interviews and observations of the key participants in global institutions; and (3) they will undertake six case studies which combine primary documentary sources, consultations with country specialists, sources from international financial institutions, secondary analysis, and interviews in each country. Through this approach, the researchers seek to stimulate the nascent literature on the globalization of law and to inject law into cross-disciplinary debates and research on globalization of markets.