The Relevance of Law to Sovereign Debt
Journal: Annual Review of Law and Social Science
Year: 2015

The literature on sovereign debt treats law as of marginal significance, largely because the doctrine of sovereign immunity leaves creditors few potent legal remedies against sovereign borrowers. Although sovereign debts can indeed be hard to enforce, the goal of this article is to demonstrate that law plays a central, and constantly evolving, role in structuring sovereign debt markets. To list just a few examples, legal rules and institutions (a) decide when a borrower is sovereign, (b) define