This article maps the changing global conversation on virtual currencies (VCs) internationally And brings that to bear on the development of a suitable regulatory framework for VCs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Through a review of recent international developments, the article notes a reversal in regulatory attitude towards VCs. This review suggests two emerging horizons of regulatory intervention. The first concerns the public issue of VCs to develop financial traceability and economic transparencyan arrangement that would be particularly relevant for developing countries with large informal economies. In particular, public VC issue raises follow-up questions of technological adequacy and the legal status of a means of payment guaranteed by the State. The second concerns privately issued VCs traded on independent platforms and focuses on the trade off between economic development, through a private market for VCs, and the risks connected to money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Here, a two-pronged system of ex ante licensing to private venture capitalists, coupled with ex post-sanctions, appears to be an emerging international standard for supporting economic development in countries marked by the preponderant weight of an underground economy.

No abstract

This article reveals the different formative layers at work in a mixed system of law, such as that of private law in the United Arab Emirates (uae), by focusing on the lack of coherence between competing ‘architectural principles’. This experience of friction is regularly encountered by a skilled interpreter of the law, in the course of his/her activity of ensuring predictable and appropriate legal responses to practical problems. Specifically, this piece tracks the interpretive difficulties surfacing in cases of supervening impossibility of performance for loss or damage to a necessary item, when that loss or damage originates in a causal factor outside of the defendant’s sphere of control (‘extraneous cause’). In such cases, the contract is terminated and the legal question shifts to one of awarding compensation for the loss or damage suffered by the item. In the face of this question, two competing criteria for assigning liability come into play. On the one hand, the civil law distinction between unilateral and bilateral contracts, meaning contracts giving rise to obligations upon only one or both parties to the contract. On the other hand, the categories of trust-based, liability-based and mixed possession in Islamic law. Here, liability is assigned based on the material circumstances that define the manner of possession, as opposed to looking at the abstract scheme of performance and (if available) counter-performance. The categories drawn from Islamic law have the potential to unify a number of apparently scattered provisions in the uae Civil Code: for this reason, the article puts forth a recommendation to follow the approach of the Iraqi Civil Code and acknowledge those categories as an explicit organising principle for assigning liability in the presence of an extraneous cause. The paper makes an additional recommendation to treat the classification of possession (as trust-based or liability-based) as a matter of public policy, unavailable for the parties’ consensual deviation.

No abstract