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Full-Text Articles in Law

Vultures Or Vanguards: The Role Of Litigation In Sovereign Debt Restructuring Conference On Sovereign Debt Restructuring: The View From The Legal Academy, Jill E. Fisch, Caroline M. Gentile Jan 2004

Vultures Or Vanguards: The Role Of Litigation In Sovereign Debt Restructuring Conference On Sovereign Debt Restructuring: The View From The Legal Academy, Jill E. Fisch, Caroline M. Gentile

Faculty Scholarship

The market for sovereign debt differs from the market for corporate debt in several important ways including the risk of opportunistic default by sovereign debtors, the importance of political pressures, and the presence of international development organizations. Moreover, countries are subject to neither liquidation nor standardized processes of debt reorganization. Instead, negotiations between a sovereign debtor and its creditors lead to a voluntary restructuring of the sovereign's debt. One of the greatest difficulties in restructuring claims against sovereign debtors is balancing the interests of the majority of the creditors with those of minority creditors. Holdout creditors serve as a check …


Building A Better Seating Chart For Sovereign Restructurings, Anna Gelpern Jan 2004

Building A Better Seating Chart For Sovereign Restructurings, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Every sovereign debt restructuring in recent memory has wrestled with the problem of inter-creditor equity. Governments have discriminated among creditors in ways that were hard to predict and often were not revealed until after a debt default. In contrast, debts of firms, individuals and even localities are ranked in order of priority established by contract and statute. This ranking is known at borrowing, generally corresponds to the order of repayment in bankruptcy liquidation, and helps define the creditors' relative bargaining power in reorganization. Without a bankruptcy backstop, most debts of national governments are legally equal. Yet in practice, sovereign immunity …