Mallard and Sgard on Contracts in Global Markets

Just out is a volume edited by Grégoire Mallard (Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva) and Jérôme Sgard (Sciences Po, Paris): Contractual Knowledge: One Hundred Years of Legal Experimentation in Global Markets (Cambridge, 2016). The press description notes that the collection

 extends the scholarship of law and globalization in two important directions. First, it provides a unique genealogy of global economic governance by explaining the transition from English law to one where global exchanges are primarily governed by international, multilateral, and finally, transnational legal orders. Second, rather than focusing on macro-political organizations, like the League of Nations or the International Monetary Fund, the book examines elements of contracts, including how and by whom they were designed and exactly who (experts, courts, arbitrators, and international organizations) interpreted, upheld, and established the legal validity of these contracts. By exploring such micro-level aspects of market exchanges, this collection unveils the contractual knowledge that led to the globalization of markets over the last century.

The book proposes a new view of globalization centered on the role of international private law. It offers a much-needed historical and comparative perspective on recent financial crises. And it examines international market governance on multiple levels, from governments to private lobbies and extra-territorial courts. 

Blurbs and Table of Contents after the jump.

Praise includes:

"This book illuminates a key but overlooked facet of the making of globalization: the power that lawyers, and the international private law they make, hold in shaping contractual expectations, fulfillments and failures." -Nitsan Chorev

"Assembling outstanding contributions from world-class scholars, Contractual Knowledge offers a unique contribution to our understanding of the chaotic history of the present international legal order." -Joseph Nathan Cohen

Here is the line-up:

1. Contractual knowledge: one hundred years of legal experimentation in global markets Grégoire Mallard and Jérôme Sgard 

Part I. Writing Sovereign Debt Obligations: The Evolution of Contractual Provisions: 

2. Financial markets, international organizations, and conditional lending: a long-term perspective Juan H. Florès 

3. When governments write contracts: policy and expertise in sovereign debt markets W. Mark C. Weidemaier, Mitu Gulati and Anna Gelpern 

4. Market rules: social conventions, legal fictions, and the organization of sovereign debt markets in the long twentieth century Stephen C. Nelson 

Part II. Consolidating International Organizations: The Mobilization of Social Capital and the Standardization of Interpretive Processes: 

5. A tale of three cities: the construction of international commercial arbitration Jérôme Sgard 

6. Constructing a transatlantic marketplace of disputes: on the symbolic foundations of international justice Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth 

7. The duty to repair in practice: the hundred years history of a legal concept Ariel Colonomos and Grégoire Mallard8. The changing ideas about valuation mechanisms in the interwar period: Toeplitz, Marlio and the 'great transformation' Marco Bertilorenzi and Giuseppe Telesca 

Part III. Structuring Fields: Market Dominance, Complementarity, and Differentiation in Complex Institutional Ecologies: 

9. The rise and fall of trade and monetary legal orders: from the interwar period to today's global imbalances Gregory Shaffer and Michael Waibel 

10. Credit ratings and global economic governance: non-price valuation in financial markets Bruce G. Carruthers 

11. Contracts and private law in the emerging ecology of international lawmaking Susan Block-Lieb and Terence Halliday. 

More information is available here.