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Category: Monetary Law

The case for digital assets legislation in Scotland

by David Fox, Professor of Common Law, University of Edinburgh

The England and Wales Law Commission has recently published its final report on Digital Assets (Digital assets – Law Commission).[1]  The report comes after an exhaustive study of the way that existing principles of private law in England and Wales would apply to this emerging class of assets.  It is of great significance since digital assets are fast becoming mainstream vehicles for carrying out financial transactions as conventional forms of financial securities are adapted to work on blockchain technology.  The report acknowledges that private law is as relevant to digital assets as the specialist regimes of financial services regulation that were the main focus of attention in the early days of their development.

The Law Commission report is relevant to Scotland which has an important fintech industry of its own but where the application of fundamental principles of Scots private law to digital assets remains obscure.  Any new clarification of the legal rules in Scotland would need to allow for the subtle similarities and differences between English and Scots property law and for the divergent patterns of legal development in each jurisdiction.

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CBDC as a financial inclusion toolkit and preparing the relevant legal framework

By Fransiska Ari Indrawati, PhD Candidate, Edinburgh Law School*

Throughout most of history, money as a tool of payment has taken the form of tangible objects such as coins and banknotes. However, the rapid development of digital technology has changed the payment landscape. In the UK, for example, most of the liquid funds used in payments nowadays consist of intangible bank deposits. So far, these are all privately-created forms of money rather than state-issued legal tender.

However, this may be about to change. Many central banks are seeking to expand the supply of state-issued intangible money by introducing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs are a form of digital fiat money issued by a central bank. It is simplest to think of them as traditional coins or banknotes issued by a central bank but existing in a purely digital form. CBDCs thus circulate alongside tangible forms of money and perform their traditional functions, i.e., as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value.

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Nation-Building, Capital Markets and Meaning of le Franc Or

by David Fox, Professor of Common Law, University of Edinburgh*

The Case of the Serbian Loans issued in France (1929) 56 J. Dr. Int’l 977 was one the earliest and most influential of the inter-war cases on the interpretation of gold clauses in long-term bond contracts.  As a decision of the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague, its reasoning influenced decisions in the French, English and United States courts.  It established that a payment clause stipulating for payment of gold coin would be interpreted as creating an obligation to pay legal tender money corresponding to the gold value of the money owed by the issuer of the bond.

Now that all world currencies have broken their link with gold, that point of law is unlikely ever to arise again.  But the case has an enduring significance beyond the superseded point it stands for.  The sparse legal record offers a glimpse into important historical events of the early twentieth century, and the way they impinged on the financial arrangements of the governments and investors of the time.  We see financial deals being done by an emerging nation state and the imperial Great Powers of the era.  Less comfortably, we see an example of the inevitable link between finance and war in a time when notions of “ethical investment” were still a century away from being articulated.

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State Finance, Monetary Sovereignty, and the First World War

by David Fox, Professor of Common Law, University of Edinburgh*

Questions of state finance rarely figure in litigation before the domestic courts, and the economic instability wrought by the First World War is now a subject for the books on financial history rather than a problem of practical investment. (For the history, on which this note relies, see Burk, Britain, America and Sinews of War 1914-1918 (1985) and Strachan, Financing the First World War (2004)). In 1937, however, both were live questions before the House of Lords. In R v International Trustee for the Protection of Bondholders Aktiengesellschaft [1937] A.C. 500 the Lords engaged with the perennial conflict between contracting parties’ freedom to hedge against economic risk and a state’s sovereign power to control the monetary system. Although the state in question was the United States of America rather than Great Britain, the court’s recognition of America’s sovereign power worked to the financial advantage of the British government. The government found the value of its war debts reduced.

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