Clauses & Controversies

YPF and Argentina’s Contributions to International Law Argentina owes over $16 billion in connection with its nationalization of state oil company YPF. A federal judge in the Southern District of New York is considering whether to order Argentina to hand over its shares in YPF — technically located outside the United S

The Penalty Doctrine in Contract Law We've never been fans of the contract law rule against penalties. Why can't parties (sophisticated ones at least) agree to suffer a penalty in the event of breach? We’d ordinarily avoid this topic, because the doctrine makes little sense and the issue doesn’t come up much in the sov

A New Competition For Law (and Jurisdiction)? Jurisdictions famously compete for businesses to use their corporate law. Less discussed is the competition for having one’s law chosen to govern contracts. But it happens. Sovereign debt lawyers in England and New York can, if they have a few drinks in them, can be quite e

An Execution Sale is Not a Receivership. (Right?) Creditors of Venezuela and PDVSA, its state oil company, have forced an execution sale of PDVSA's only US asset – which happens to be the ultimate parent company of CITGO. The federal judge overseeing the process has tried to keep things orderly, but the inter-creditor

Hamilton Bank v. Sri Lanka: What the $@#$ ? Accusations that Hamilton Bank is a giant fraudster stealing depositor funds, bizarro requests from Hamilton to the court that other creditors be constrained in using their contract rights against it, an amicus intervention in the case to say nothing at all . . . and on and o

Zambia’s Restructuring: A Post-Mortem Zambia’s recently concluded restructuring seemed to drag on forever, debilitated by conflicts among the various creditor groups. Why did these different groups think the others were being unreasonable in their demands? And what can we learn from what happened? Our guest is one of t