Law Commons^™

Chinese Resource-For-Infrastructure (Rfi) Investments In Sub-Saharan Africa And The Future Of The "Rules-Based" Framework For Sovereign Finance: The Sicomines Case Study, Jingwei Xu

Michigan Journal of International Law

China has emerged as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest development financier over the past two decades. While commentators have observed novel, sui generis transactional structures in China’s financing arrangements, legal analysis of those contractual forms and their relationships to incumbent international economic governance regimes remains scant. This note addresses those scholarly lacunae, taking as its case study the 2008 Sicomines Agreement—a multi-billion USD investment financing agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and various Chinese corporate entities that merges infrastructure investment with a mineral extraction joint-venture project. It demonstrates that the Sicomines Agreement selectively draws on and integrates pre-existing modes of …

Modernizing The Bank Charter, David Zaring

William & Mary Law Review

The banking charter—the license a bank needs to obtain before it can open—has become the centerpiece of an argument about what finance should do for the rest of the economy, both in academia and at the banking agencies. Some advocates have proposed using the charter to pursue industrial policy or to end shadow banking. Some regulators have proposed giving financial technology firms bank charters, potentially breaking down the traditionally high walls between banking and commerce. An empirical survey of chartering decisions by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency suggests that chartering is best understood as an ultracautious licensing …

Legal Literature Review Of Social Entrepreneurship And Impact Investing (2007-2017): Doing Good By Doing Business, Deborah Burand, Anne Tucker

William & Mary Business Law Review

Although the ambition to do good by doing business is not new, the burgeoning realization of this ambition is. As the fields of social entrepreneurship and impact investing advance in size, scope and complexity, questions about the roles of corporations and capital markets in society intensify.

What is legal scholarship contributing to this discussion? This Article reviews the scholarly contributions of 260 articles written by over 150 authors about the fields of social enterprise, social finance, and impact investing. The Article maps the contributions of legal scholarship over the last decade—from 2007 (when the term “impact investing” was first coined) …

The Segregation Of Markets, Christian Turner

Texas A&M Law Review

Campaign-finance reformers fear that rich donors’ money can be used disproportionately to influence the content of campaign advertising and thus, perhaps, the results of elections. In European football, UEFA has attempted to ban “financial doping”—rich owners’ use of money earned in sectors other than football to pay large sums for the best football players. Campaign-finance reform efforts and “financial fair play” rules in sport may seem like bespoke solutions to different problems. In fact, they are the same solution to the same problem. Both are attempts to ensure that power accumulated in one market is not brought into another market …

The Layers Of Digital Financial Innovation: Charting A Regulatory Response, Teresa Rodriguez De Las Heras Ballell

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The increasing penetration of digital technologies in financial markets is evidenced by promising adoption rates among users, expanding presence of fintech firms and bigtech providing techfin services, and the growing use of fintech solutions by incumbents. The increasingly popular term "fintech" captures the accelerated transformation of contemporary financial markets driven and enabled by technology, and encapsulates its multifarious potential impact on services, market structures, and business models. This Article first aims to devise and propose an analytical framework to understand the digital challenges to financial regulation based on the "layers of digital financial innovation" theory. Accordingly, digital innovation (fintech) is …

The Regulation Of Cryptocurrencies: Between A Currency And A Financial Product, Hadar Y. Jabotinsky Dr.

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

Cryptocurrencies are electronically generated and stored currencies by which users can trade either real or virtual objects with one another. As these digital assets gain popularity, the issue of how to regulate them becomes more pressing. Cryptocurrencies are attractive due in part to their decentralized, peer-to-peer structure. This makes them an alternative to national currencies which are controlled by central banks. Given that these cryptocurrencies are already replacing some of the “regular” national currencies and financial products, the question then arises—should they be regulated? And if so, how? This paper draws the legal distinction between cryptocurrencies which are in fact …

Petition For Rulemaking On Short And Distort, John C. Coffee Jr., Joshua Mitts, James D. Cox, Peter Molk, Edward Greene, Randall S. Thomas, Meyer-Eisenberg, Robert B. Thompson, Colleen Honigsberg, Andrew Verstein, Donald C. Langevoort, Charles K. Whitehead

Faculty Scholarship

Today, some hedge funds attack public companies for the sole purpose of inducing a short-lived panic which they can exploit for profit. This sort of market manipulation harms average investors who entrust financial markets with their retirement savings. While short selling serves a critical function in the capital markets, some short sellers disseminate negative opinion about a company, inducing a panic and sharp decline in the stock price, and rapidly close that position for a profit prior to the price partially or fully rebounding. We urge the SEC to enact two rules which will discourage manipulative short selling. The petition …