Approximation of Secured Credit Laws in Global Economies: Methodological Challenges

Abstract

The principal aim of this volume is to explore commercial contract law in scholarship and legal practice, to discuss new research agendas and provide a forum for debate of topical issues that might benefit from further attention by scholarship and legislatures. This chapter on methodological challenges within the approximation of personal property security law regimes raises what is a key contemporary problem as commercial legislations continue to grow out of national boundaries. It raises some of the most challenging issues in this area of commercial law due to its dependence on baseline concepts of insolvency and property laws and because of the vast differences within the laws of national legal systems in these areas. This chapter thus contributes to a topic of central importance to any project of law reform on an international level in commercial law. In particular, in the context of multiple projects for the approximation and modernisation of personal property security law, this chapter proposes to analyse some of the methodological challenges that have arisen as a result of these initiatives. It is argued that there are still outstanding challenges and obstacles to the comprehensive approximation and modernisation of personal property security law. The analysis sketches out and critically considers four methodological challenges connected to the justification of approximation of law projects, the appropriation of international endeavours and the issues of legitimacy and enforcement within the emergence of a transnational personal property security law framework.