Eric Alston (University of Wyoming College of Law), Andrew P. Morriss (Texas A&M University), and May Hen (Simon Fraser University) have posted Adaptive Legal Infrastructures for Global Digital Economies on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Small jurisdictions have become important suppliers of legal infrastructure for new classes of digital economic activity. We examine the Cayman Islands, the Dubai International Financial Centre, Gibraltar, Jersey, Guernsey, and Wyoming, with Anguilla as a boundary case and several other jurisdictions as comparisons. Our central claim is that these jurisdictions produce portable legal products—entity wrappers, asset categories, licensing pathways, fiduciary structures, and dispute-resolution institutions—that allow globally mobile digital activities to become legally usable. We develop this claim in four steps. Part I explains why digital economic actors in novel areas like cryptocurrencies still need law, notwithstanding code, platforms, and private ordering. Part II considers how small jurisdictions supply legal products for those needs, including legal personality, asset recognition, regulatory legibility, fiduciary governance, financial access, and credible dispute resolution. Part III discusses the institutional conditions that make those products credible: prior legal capacity, professional intermediaries, responsive government, regulatory access, embeddedness, and time. Part IV addresses limits and failures, including windfalls without absorption, inert statutes, supervisory credibility failures, federal and transnational ceilings, and the possibility that successful prototypes may later be absorbed by larger legal systems.
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