This work examines both the UK and international regulation, as well as the case law and legislation affecting a wide spectrum of modern financial techniques. Within the scope of those financial techniques are the broad range of instruments, structures and contracts deployed by global financial markets in relation to corporate customers, sovereign entities and other public sector bodies.

The essays in this collection are concerned with the nature of the modernity of financial products like derivatives, and the particularly acute challenge that they pose both to the control of financial markets by private law and by established means of regulation.

Much of the book focuses on derivatives as exemplars of this broader context. The authors analyse practical and theoretical issues as diverse as credit derivatives, dematerialised securities, the ISDA EMU protocol, and the OTC derivatives market, as well as the regulation of financial products, the economics of financial techniques, and the international regulatory framework.

They examine issues of private law, including the legal implications of immobilisation and dematerialisation in collateral transactions, seller liability in credit derivatives markets and fraud. The essays examine the benefits and shortcomings of various legal mechanisms and methods of financial regulation, and suggest new approaches to the questions facing the law of international finance.

The essays in this book arose out of the W.G. Hart workshop on Transnational Corporate Finance and the Challenge to the Law held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London in 1998.