The global financial crisis demonstrated the inability and unwillingness of financial market participants to safeguard the stability of the financial system. It also highlighted the enormous direct and indirect costs of addressing systemic crises after they have occurred, as opposed to...

The subprime mortgage crisis is undermining financial market stability and has the potential to cause a true systemic breakdown. This short and accessible essay, which is based on the author's 2008 Roy R. Ray Lecture at SMU Law School, uses this crisis to demonstrate that existing protections...

This book chapter, which synthesizes several of the author's articles, attempts to provide useful perspectives on regulating systemic risk. First, it argues that systemic shocks are inevitable. Accordingly, regulation should be designed not only to try to reduce those shocks but also to protect...

As exemplified by the dramatic failure of AIG, insurance companies and their affiliates played a central role in the 2008 global financial crisis. It is therefore not surprising that the Dodd-Frank Act — the United States' primary legislative response to the crisis — contained an entire...

There's long been a debate whether corporate governance law should require some duty to the public. The accepted wisdom is not to require such a duty — that corporate profit maximization provides jobs and other public benefits that exceed any harm. This is especially true, the argument goes,...

This accessible analysis of systemic risk regulation was delivered as the keynote speech at an October 20, 2011 European Central Bank conference on regulation of financial services. Many regulatory responses, like the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States, consist largely of politically motivated...

This lecture examines the causes of the global financial crisis, showing it was triggered by market failures, not by financial institution failures, and arguing that any regulatory framework for managing systemic risk must address markets as well as institutions. The lecture also analyzes how...

This piece is forthcoming in the special symposium issue arising out of the 2014 American Bankruptcy Institute-University of Illinois College of Law academic symposium. U.S. bankruptcy law grants special rights and immunities to creditors in derivatives transactions, including virtually...