Finding Legal Principle in Global Financial Regulation

How does global financial regulation work? I propose six principles that organize its current practice: 1) a national treatment principle, 2) a most favored nation principle, 3) a preference for rulemaking over adjudication, 4) a subsidiarity principle of enforcement, 5) a peer review model of enforcement, and 6) a network model of institutionalization. Most of these principles are shared by other institutions that meet the criteria of formal international law. These emerging doctrines and institutional arrangements are stable, principled, and accordingly increasingly amenable to traditional legal analysis. While financial regulatory cooperation, as it is currently structured, is not the same thing as public international law, it exemplifies the parallel development of legal and other forms of state obligation. Moreover, analyzing global financial regulation as a law-like institution offers new insights into an increasingly paramount form of the regulation of finance, one that is likely to be a principal accomplishment of twenty-first-century international cooperation