The global financial crisis has led many regulators and lawmakers to a rethinking about current versus optimum financial market structures and activities that include a variety and even radical ideas about deleveraging and downsizing finance. This paper focuses on the flaws and shortcomings of regulatory reforms of finance and on the necessity of and scope for more radical transformative strategies. With ‘crisis economics’ back, the most developed countries, including the EU member states, are still on the edge of disaster and confronted with systemic risk. Changes in financial regulation adopted in the aftermath of the financial meltdown have not been radical enough to transform the overall system of finance-driven capitalism towards a more sustainable system with a more embedded finance. The paper discusses financialisation in order to understand the development trends in finance over the past decades and examines various theories to describe the typical trends and patterns in financial regulation. By focusing on a limited number of regulatory reforms in the European Union, the limitations of current reforms and the need for additional transformative strategies necessary to overcome the finance-driven accumulation regime are explored. Finally, the regulatory space for such transformative strategies and for taming finance in times of crisis, austerity, and increased public protest potential is analysed.

This paper attempts to locate the place of law in debates on the economic crisis. It suggests that law is the meeting point of politics and economics, not simply the background to market operations. It is suggested therefore that the law should be seen as the conduit of the popular will through political decision making onto economic systems and processes. The paper argues that the crisis can be seen as being the consequence of the dis-embedding of the political from the economic, and it is this distance that causes legal frameworks to operate in unsatisfactory ways. With this theoretical basis, the paper examines the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. The European debt crisis in general and the plight of Greece in particular show why plasticity in policy making is necessary and also reveal why current orthodox solutions to economic calamities fail. The inflexibility of the neoclassical understanding of the state-market relationship does not allow for avenues out of crisis that are both theoretically coherent and politically welcome. Such realisations form the basis of the examination of the rules framing the Eurozone. This paper, after conducting an investigation of exit points from the Eurozone, condemns the current institutional framework of the EU, and especially the EMU as inflexible and inadequate to deal with the stress being placed on Europe by the crisis.

The idea that cooperative law is essential for the development of cooperatives is not new, but only lately is it spreading rapidly within cooperative circles and urging representative entities of the cooperative movement to take concrete actions. Also in light of this renewed interest towards the cooperative legal theory, this article will seek to demonstrate that recognizing and protecting a distinct identity based on a specific purpose constitute the essential role of cooperative law. The article will subsequently discuss, also from a comparative legal perspective, the nature and essence of the cooperative purpose and some related regulation issues.

In both the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), the law governing the enforcement of foreign judgments is evolving, but in different directions. EU law, especially after the elimination of exequatur by the 2012 ’Recast’ of the Brussels I Regulation, increasingly facilitates enforcement in member states of judgments of other member states’ courts, reflecting growing faith in a multilateral private international law approach to foreign judgments. In US law, on the other hand, increasingly widespread adoption of state legislation based on the 2005 Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act (2005 Act), which adds new case-specific grounds for refusing enforcement, suggests growing scepticism. In this essay, I explore possible reasons for these diverging trends. I begin with the most obvious explanation: the Brussels framework governs the effect of internal EU member state judgments within the EU, whereas the 2005 Act governs the effect of external foreign country judgments within the US. One would expect more mutual trust – and thus more faith in foreign judgment enforcement – internally than externally. But I argue that this mutual trust explanation is only partially satisfactory. I therefore sketch out two other possible explanations. One is that the different trends in EU and US law are a result of an emphasis on ’governance values’ in EU law and an emphasis on ’rights values’ in US law. Another explanation – and perhaps the most fundamental one – is that these trends are ultimately traceable to politics.

This contribution firstly reviews developments in the EU and in the United States on corporate social responsibility and conflict of laws. It concludes with reference to some related themes, in particular on the piercing of the corporate veil and with some remarks on compliance strategy, and compliance reality, for corporations.

Background: The notion of responsibility for peace in this article is examined through the analysis of stories told by seven peace activists that have chosen to promote peace in the midst of the violent 1990s conflicts in the Balkans by resisting or rejecting violence. Purpose: This study aims to explore what it means to perform responsible action (i.e. why certain individuals choose peace in the midst of conflict, despite danger and risk for themselves), and what makes their peace activities successful. Methodology: The research is based on seven in-depth semi-structured interviews. By means of dynamical systems theory and Levinas’ concept of responsibility, this study traces the positive attractor dynamics within individual narratives of these peace activists, which includes actions or thinking that produce peaceful outcomes in conflict systems. Findings: The findings suggest that inquiry and openness towards the Other rooted in care and responsibility can serve as a positive attractor in a conflict system. Successful peace activities are enabled through learning from past mistakes and creation of inclusive and diverse spaces for interaction in which historical narratives can be expanded and non-violent strategies can be embraced. Originality/value: This study contributes to the body of knowledge on how change leading to peaceful outcomes can be introduced in conflict systems through peace activism and how we can deal with the current and future violent conflicts more constructively. It also helps to bridge the gap between practice of and research on conflict resolution by giving voice to the practitioners and eliciting lessons from the ground.

The competing visions of international criminal justice between the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the African Union (AU) reached a climax with the recent adoption of the AU Protocol enlarging the mandate of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights to cover criminal jurisdiction. The Protocol, inter alia, grants immunity to state officials for atrocious crimes, which clearly conflicts with the ICC Statute’s normative framework. This dialectic is bound to deepen an already toxic relationship between the two international players. This article calls for practical reasonableness by all stakeholders in order to revive the diminishing effort at advancing international criminal justice in Africa.

The generation of American international lawyers who founded the American Society of International Law in 1906 and nurtured the soil for what has been retrospectively called a 'moralistic-legalistic approach to international relations' remains little studied. A survey of the rise of international legal literature in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the Great War serves as a backdrop to the examination of the boosting effect on international law of the Spanish American War in 1898. An examination of the Insular Cases before the US Supreme Court is then accompanied by the analysis of a number of influential factors behind the pre-war rise of international law in the United States. The work concludes with an examination of the rise of natural law doctrines in international law during the interwar period and the critiques addressed by the realist founders of the field of 'international relations' to the 'moralistic-legalistic approach to international relations'.

The plain language movement (PLM) for the writing of laws calls for improving legislative clarity by drafting the laws in a clear, simple, and precise manner. However, the main purpose of this aspiration is to facilitate the ordinary legislative audience to understand the laws with the least effort. In this respect, turning the pages of recent history reveals that this movement for plain language statutes has mostly been debated and analysed in the context of English as a language of the legislative text. However, in some parts of the multilingual world like India and Pakistan, English is not understood by the ordinary population at a very large scale but is still used as a language of the legislative text. This disparity owes its genesis to different country-specific ethnolingual and political issues. In this context but without going into the details of these ethnolingual and political elements, this article aims to analyse the prospects of plain Urdu legislative language in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan by by analyzing (1) the possibility of producing a plain language version of the legislative text in Urdu and (2) the potential benefit that the ordinary people of Pakistan can get from such plain statutes in terms of the themes of the PLM. In answering these questions, the author concludes that neither (at present) is it possible to produce plain Urdu versions of the statute book in Pakistan nor is the population of Pakistan likely to avail any current advantage from the plain Urdu statutes and further that, for now, it is more appropriate to continue with the colonial heritage of English as the language of the legislative text.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the European regulatory efforts to guarantee investors a proper understanding of the characteristics of the products being offered in the retail financial market. In particular, the analysis emphasises the proposal to introduce plain language as a mandatory requirement for drafting pre-contractual documents relating to retail financial products.
The 2007-2009 financial crisis brought to attention the importance of providing investors with more information on financial products to help them make informed investment decisions. However, more disclosure alone is not enough. The quantity and quality of information to be disclosed must go hand in hand with the way the information is communicated.
Plain language is seen as an adequate tool to make information more transparent and understandable to the average investor. However, to make plain language a valuable instrument, it is necessary to enhance the ability of those who have the responsibility to apply it, that is, the financial products’ issuers and distributors.
This aspect deserves proper consideration; otherwise, the benefit of plain language will remain on paper.