Law Commons^™

Commentary: The Trajectory Of Complex Business Contracting In Latin America, Claire A. Hill

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Latin American contract documentation used to be quite short, as is typical in civil law countries. Increasingly, it resembles U.S. contract documentation: long, detailed, and full of boilerplate. This commentary discusses this development, and considers what effect it will have on contracting practice in Latin America; it also considers some broader implications of international convergence in contracting practices.

I argue that the explanation can't be that U.S. contracting practices are superior. That explanation doesn't even work in the U.S., where parties and institutions are geared up to use U.S. practices and documentation. Indeed, most of the virtues of U.S.-style contracting …

Constitutional Transplants And The Mutation Effect, Horacio Spector

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article is concerned with constitutional transplantation, that is, the borrowing of constitutional institutions and precedents from foreign jurisdictions. It pursues two main goals. First, it argues that the borrowing of constitutional texts can be successful over long periods of time, and that when the transplanted texts fail, this failure is not easily attributable to transplantation alone. Second, it introduces the notion of a "mutation effect" to the theoretical analyses of judicial transplants. By "mutation" of precedents, the author means the process of continuing to extend the scope of a holding, regardless of its factual basis, to cover situations not …

Domestic Bonds, Credit Derivatives, And The Next Transformation Of Sovereign Debt, Anna Gelpern

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Financial markets in poor and middle-income countries are experiencing a fundamental shift. Until recently, most of them were shallow-to-nonexistent and closed to foreigners. Governments often had to rely on risky borrowing abroad; the private sector had even fewer options. But between 1995 and 2005, domestic debt in the emerging markets grew from $1 trillion to $4 trillion dollars. In Mexico, domestic debt went from just over twenty percent of the total government debt stock in 1995 to nearly eighty percent in 2007. Over the same period, derivative contracts to transfer emerging market credit risk surpassed the market capitalization of the …