Recently added articles from Law and Contemporary Problems:

Odious debt wears two faces: systemic illegitimacy, problems, and opportunities in traditional odious debt conceptions in globalized economic regimes.

Sep 22, 2007; Backer, Larry Cata ... I INTRODUCTION In the early 1980s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) resisted a lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court seeking to enforce obligations to pay on defaulted bearer bonds issued by the Chinese Imperial government in 1911. (1) The PRC maintained, in part, ...

Partially odious debts?

Sep 22, 2007; Ben-Shahar, Omri ... I INTRODUCTION The despotic ruler of a poor nation borrows extensively from foreign creditors. He spends some of those funds on building statues of himself, others on buying arms for his brutal secret police, and he places the remainder in his personal bank accounts ...

Odious debts or odious regimes?

Sep 22, 2007; Bolton, Patrick ... I INTRODUCTION Odious regimes have always been with us. That there is no silver-bullet solution that will prevent odious regimes from arising, or stymie them once they do, is evident from the plethora of responses employed by the international community once a ...

Law and transnational corruption: the need for Lincoln's law abroad.

Sep 22, 2007; Carrington, Paul D. ... INTRODUCTION The endemic corruption of weak governments in poor nations is a major impediment to the development of world trade beneficial to both those who work for a living and those who manage them. Public corruption, like private greed, is a problem everywhere. It was an ...

The odious debt doctrine after Iraq.

Sep 22, 2007; Damle, Jai ... I INTRODUCTION The odious debt doctrine has experienced renewed popularity in the past few years; it has been heralded by academics, political commentators, economists, and politicians as a mechanism to alleviate burdens imposed by illegitimate rulers. In its classic ...

Agency by analogy: a comment on odious debt.

Sep 22, 2007; DeMott, Deborah A. ... I INTRODUCTION This brief article focuses on how one might think about the phenomenon of odious debt from the standpoint of common-law agency. Though this analogy has its flaws, some useful insights can be gathered by examining the similarities and differences ...

Equitable subordination, fraudulent transfer, and sovereign debt.

Sep 22, 2007; Feibelman, Adam ... I INTRODUCTION Until recently, debates over sovereign debt have primarily focused on whether and how sovereigns in financial distress should be able to restructure their obligations. (1) More recently, however, since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, a new ...

Odious debt, old and new: the legal intellectual history of an idea.

Sep 22, 2007; Feinerman, James V. ... I INTRODUCTION In a sense, all debts are odious; that is, to use dictionary definitions, "hateful; disgusting; offensive." (1) Yet insofar as international economic law today is concerned, only a certain few debts can be considered "odious debts" in order to contest ...

Odious, illegitimate, illegal, or legal debts - what difference does it make for international chapter 9 debt arbitration?

Sep 22, 2007; Raffer, Kunibert ... I INTRODUCTION Once upon a time, sovereign debts were just that--debts or the entitlement to be repaid fully, including interest. During the 1970s it was thought unnecessary to make any distinctions between debts, based on the assumption that sovereigns might ...

Sovereign debt restructuring, odious debt, and the politics of debt relief.

Sep 22, 2007; Rasmussen, Robert K. ... I INTRODUCTION Odious debt is more of a literature than a doctrine. Going back to at least the 1920s, one can find arguments that countries should not have to pay back debts that are labeled "odious." (1) The central intuition is that the citizens of a country should ...

Odious debt in retrospect.

Sep 22, 2007; Tarullo, Daniel K. ... I INTRODUCTION In the eighty years since Alexander Sack coined the phrase "odious debt," academics and activists have periodically rediscovered Sack's idea, often arguing for its application or extension--to this point, in vain. The articles in this volume, as well ...