ABSTRACT

Contemporary capitalist economies are centred around the flow of finance in the form of credit. Creditor-debtor relationships are at the heart of the networks of contracts and organizations that link together the major sectors and actors in the economy. The emergence of transnational credit finance, however, has posed a variety of challenges for states and their legal systems. The forms that credit takes are the product and object of legal regulation, and the differences in the ways that legal orders conceptualize and govern credit finance are substantial and deeply rooted. In their attempts to promote and regulate transnational commerce, states, international institutions, financial institutions, and legal professionals are now engaged in multiple arenas to find strategies to overcome these differences through the harmonization of the legal regimes governing finance. These actors share a common project of achieving an international consensus on the principles of financial law, and to use this as a standard to guide the reform of national legal systems.