Pierre-Hugues Verdier

In the years since the 2008 financial crisis, U.S. federal prosecutors have brought dozens of criminal cases against the world's most powerful banks, charging them with helping their customers evade taxes, manipulating financial indices, evading sanctions, and laundering money. To settle these cases, global banks like UBS, Barclays, HSBC, and BNP Paribas paid tens of billions of dollars in fines. They also agreed to extensive internal reforms, hiring hundreds of compliance officers, spending billions on new systems, and installing independent corporate monitors. In effect, they agreed to become worldwide enforcers of U.S. laws and policies, including financial sanctions--sometimes in spite of their own governments' protests. This book examines the U.S. enforcement campaign against global banks across four areas: benchmark manipulation, tax evasion, sanctions violations, and sovereign debt. It shows that U.S. prosecutors have unilaterally carved out a new role as global bank regulators, heralding a fundamental shift in how international finance is overseen. Their ability to do so stems from U.S. control over vital hubs of the international financial system, where they can threaten global banks with exclusion. In some areas, these unilateral U.S. actions have ushered in important multilateral reforms, such as the rise of automatic tax information exchange and better regulated financial indices. In other areas, such as financial sanctions, unilateralism has attracted protests from other states and attempts to bypass U.S.-based financial infrastructure, which could undermine the country's power.

U. S. Prosecutions and the Remaking of International Finance

Global Banks on Trial

Mila Versteeg

Anthea Roberts

Paul B. Stephan, III

By definition, international law, once agreed upon and consented to, applies to all parties equally. It is perhaps the one area of law where cross-country comparison seems inappropriate, because all parties are governed by the same rules. However, as this book explains, states sometimes adhere to similar, and at other times, adopt different interpretations of the same international norms and standards. International legal rules are not a monolithic whole, but are the basis for ongoing contestation in which states set forth competing interpretations. International norms are interpreted and redefined by national executives, legislatures, and judiciaries. These varying and evolving interpretations can, in turn, change and impact the international rules themselves. These similarities and differences make for an important, but thus far, largely unexamined object of comparison. This is the premise for this book, and for what the editors call "comparative international law." This book achieves three objectives. The first is to show that international law is not a monolith. The second is to map the cross-country similarities and differences in international legal norms in different fields of international law, as well as their application and interpretation with regards to geographic differences. The third is to make a first and preliminary attempt to explain these differences. It is organized into three broad thematic sections, exploring: conceptual matters, domestic institutions and comparative international law, and comparing approaches across issue-areas. The chapters are authored by contributors who include leading international law and comparative law scholars with diverse backgrounds, experience, and perspectives.

Pierre-Hugues Verdier

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