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Category Archives: Legal Scholars Advance the Principle of Odious Debts
Ecuador’s Sovereign Default: A Pyrrhic Victory for Odious Debt?
(February 28, 2010) Ecuador’s strategic default on some of its external debt last year has drawn much commentary and generated passionate reactions. Some commentators who advocate creating a mechanism for addressing odious or illegitimate debt encouraged Ecuador to repudiate its obligations and have generally applauded its decision to do so. For those who are sympathetic to efforts to create such a mechanism, however, this enthusiasm may be misplaced. Continue reading
Applied Legal History: Demystifying the Doctrine of Odious Debts
(March 1, 2009) “Odious debts” have been the subject of debate in academic, activist, and policy circles in recent years. The term refers to the debts of a nation that a despotic leader incurs against the interests of the populace. When the despot is overthrown, the new government—understandably—does not wish to repay creditors who helped prop up the despot… Continue reading
Why Aren’t We Developing Faster?
(March 4, 2008) According to Paul Wolfowitz, former President of the World Bank: World Bank’s beneficiary countries that do not have access to capital markets mostly “remain poor because their political system is unstable, private property rights are very limited, the judicial system is weak or subservient, or the Government is corrupt” and assistance to such countries “at best provides relief [and] at worst supports corruption or programs that waste scarce local and external resources”. Continue reading
Scholars chart new legal course
(January 16, 2008) The principles of the odious debt doctrine exploded into the modern debt debate following the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, capturing the attention of legal scholars and exciting new thought on the history, the foundation, and the future application of the doctrine. Continue reading
Sovereign debt and social rights – legal reflections on a difficult relationship
(January 1, 2008) The relationship between the sovereign debt of developing countries and the protection of social rights in those countries has received a lot of attention from an economic, political and moral perspective, but relatively little has been written about the legal side of this relationship. Continue reading
Equitable subordination, fraudulent transfer, and sovereign debt
(November 27, 2007) There is a growing body of scholarship that attempts to identify workable mechanisms to enable sovereigns to repudiate ‘odious’ sovereign debt – obligations incurred by sovereign regimes that provide no corresponding benefit to the sovereign debtor itself. Continue reading
Contractualism and the moral evaluation of international economic institutions: the case of odious debt
(April 6, 2007) Contractualism as T. M. Scanlon has conceptualized it has become one of
the more influential moral theories of the past decade. Though
contractualism connects to the social contract tradition, it has not
yet been developed into a full-fledged political philosophy. Continue reading
