17th Ivan C. Rand Lecture
Delivered by Professor Catherine Walsh
UNB Law's 17th annual Ivan C Rand Memorial Lecture was held on February, 4th. This year's speaker, Professor Catherine Walsh, delivered a lecture entitled "After the storm - The impact of the financial crisis on private international law".
During her lecture, Professor Walsh examined the principle of party autonomy and its role in the recent financial crisis. The principle holds that those engaged in international trade are best situated to develop the rules that will govern their activities and determine the adjudicative jurisdiction in which disputes are to be resolved; government's role should only be to facilitate the enforcement of private obligations. This principle is rooted in private contract values and the primacy of market actors to self-regulate.
Professor Walsh suggested that the principle of party autonomy does promote certainty and predictability but it's also liable to be abused. Since powerful market actors have a relatively narrow interest, they're not in the best position to develop regulations designed to protect against the cascading effect of market failure. A global consensus on requisite regulation is needed in order to avoid a historical repeat of the recent failures in the global financial market. The financial crisis can be characterized as a failure of a private contract based regulatory model.
Students, faculty, and members of the community had the opportunity to speak informally with Professor Walsh following her lecture at a reception hosted at UNB law.
