Systemic risk after the global financial crisis: covered bonds and retail contracts for difference

The role of systemic risk in contributing to the causes and severity of the global financial crisis (GFC) has been widely recognised. While systemic risk has traditionally been approached as a banking issue, the GFC revealed new levels of interconnections between the banking, financial, real estate and insurance industries (FIRE) with global implications. In response, the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) adopted three new objectives of securities regulation in 2010, the third of which is reducing systemic risk , as well as new principles that emphasise the need for processes that monitor, mitigate and manage systemic risk. This article analyses systemic risk in New Zealand from a securities regulation perspective, arguing that in light of the far-reaching implications of systemic risk revealed by the GFC, securities regulators and commentators need to understand systemic risk and its operation. It then argues that two recent developments in New Zealand and Australia\u27s financial product markets pose potential systemic risks: covered bonds and retail trading in contracts for difference. Drawing on Australian studies and developments in these two areas, the article suggests some regulatory responses for New Zealand, including integrated monitoring

Queering international law\u27s stories of origin: Hospitality and homophobia

The project of \u27queering\u27 international law suggests excavating concepts of sexuality and sexual conduct in its formative moments. This chapter argues that two of the works of the sixteenth-century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria provide rich grounds for excavation. These works are often included in the genealogy of international law and sometimes in the formative moments of the modern Law of Nations. Vitoria\u27s influential work challenged prevailing justifications for the imperialist Spanish project of the invasion of Mesoamerica, replacing them with universal natural law duties of friendship and hospitality owed by the people of the \u27New World\u27 to the Spanish, facilitating the Spanish imperial project

Vitoria\u27s On the Indians, Legal Subjectivity and the Right to Travel

This article analyses configurations of legal subjectivity, sexuality and the right to travel at the inception of international law. It commences a project on a genealogy of the legal subject of the right to travel that attends to sexuality and ultimately aims to shed light on legal subjectivity and sexuality in current refugee law and policy debates. In particular, it analyses the key early 16th-century work on the law of nations of the Spanish theologian and jurisprudent, Francisco de Vitoria, which produces Christian Europeans as full legal subjects with the right to world travel, in opposition to Native Americans, who were relegated to the position partial legal subjects with duties of hospitality. It argues that the attribution of the \u27Supersins\u27 of human sacrifice, cannibalism, bestiality and sodomy to Native Americans, in part through analogy to Spain\u27s long-time enemies the Muslims, was crucial to this partial legal subjectivity, positioning both indigenous peoples subjected to colonization, and religious others, as marginalized outsiders to the law of nations at its crucial beginnings

Occupy, financial fraternity and gender ventrioloquism

A prominent response to the Occupy movement has been the question ‘‘What does Occupy want?’’ What might we understand about this persistent questioning of the Occupy movement? How might we begin to think about the Occupy movement as resistance to the culture of Wall Street and politicians in recent decades? This article provides some thoughts on the conceptual and discursive relationships between the causes of the global financial crisis, including the neoliberal consensus on financial regulation, and some of the dynamics that have arisen in relation to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In particular, it suggests that Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the tradition of fraternity in modern concepts of democracy, and feminist ideas on ‘‘speaking for others’’ may assist with understanding the relational gender dynamics of this regulatory consensus, the masculinity of the financial industry and the derivatives trading rooms, and one way in which dominant discourses are gendering the Occupy movement

Are we there yet? Best practices for diversity and inclusion in Australia

This article reports on the findings of a pilot research project investigating current best practices, operating within national law firms in Australia, that support women lawyers in their advancement to partnership and other leadership positions. The project responds to the significant under-representation of women in senior positions within the legal profession, and their higher rates of attrition. Academic research and professional body reports suggest that current diversity and inclusion initiatives across the private sector are not resulting in significant change to advancement, retention and attrition of women in the legal profession. However, work done by the Women Lawyers\u27 Association of New South Wales (WLANSW) in Australia, through the Data Comparison Project (DCP), indicates that some firms have made better progress than others. Building on the DCP, this article presents the findings of a pilot project involving in-depth interviews with four of the top-achieving national law firms in Australia on gender equity criteria. It finds that these firms are collectively engaging with many of the best practice initiatives for diversity and inclusion recommended by the current national and international research and scholarship, and in some instances go beyond international best practice. What is apparent, however, is that the current best practices have yet to achieve significant advancement of women, or to break through the glass ceilings that continue to operate for women in large Australian law firms

Imagined Legal Subjects and the Regulation of Female Genital Surgery

In this article we analyse the regulation of female genital surgery in Australia with a focus on New South Wales. We argue that the categorisation of some surgeries as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and others as Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery (FGCS) participates in the production of a constellation of gendered legal subjects, produced in language and law, that contribute to maintaining the raced and gendered status quo in Australia. Our analysis demonstrates that there is not one legal subject (or object) position for women produced through these laws; a range of legal subject positions are produced in and through this specific set of legal provisions, and these subject positions may shift over time. We analyse three legal subjects, produced relationally. First, anti-FGM feminists and female parliamentarians, who, through campaigning for and participating in passing these laws, enter into a partnership across gender with male lawmakers, become authors of law and full legal subjects of western liberal democracies in that process. Necessary to the emergence of these women as full legal subjects and authors of the law are those subjected to these legal provisions. The creation and prohibition of the category of FGM, through the definition of a wide range of varying cultural practices of female genital cutting, or female circumcision, as ‘mutilation’, creates the image of the ‘mutilated (brown) female’ as subjected to the law. Finally, a new subject of FGCS also emerges through these laws: the figure of a relatively privileged (white) woman who is saturated with sexuality and defined through the decision to mutilate her body in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. This figure, which we call the ‘new hysteric’, is the third gendered legal subject that we discuss