Financial Law

The traditional financial market sectors of insurance, commercial banking, derivatives, capital markets and asset management are converging in practice, but their analysis is still largely sector-based. This book offers a cross-sectoral, functional approach. It highlights anomalies in the different legal treatment of the respective sectors (suggesting law reform to sum, and arbitrage opportunities to others) and identifies key trends.This
book offers an integrated approach to financial law which is both useful and timely, as the markets have been converging for over two decades. Functions traditionally performed in one sector are now
undertaken in another, and financial techniques are emerging which combine characteristics of different traditional transaction types. Investment banks increasingly offer new structured products in a range of alternative legal “wrappers”. Securitisation, particularly in association with credit derivatives, continues to be a dominant force, drawing ever more categories of business into the capital markets. Innovations such as these have been associated with a high level of
legal risk, and the cross-sectoral freedoms offered by deregulation have not been fully exploited. This book presents financial law as a discrete branch of law, to be considered in the round; it will
therefore provide the practitioner, scholar or regulator with a complete, unfragmented view of the subject.

Author Biography

Dr Joanna Benjamin is a Reader in Law at the London School of Economics specialising in financial law, a consultant at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and a member of the Bank of England’s Financial Markets Law Committee. Joanna also consults for the public sector in the UK and internationally. Previous publications include The Law of Global Custody (Butterworths, 1st ed. 1996, 2nd ed., with Madeleine Yates, 2003) and Interests in Securities (Oxford University
Press, 2000).