Law
Faculty of Law
LFT Lunchtime Workshop - Law, Custom, and Code: Towards a Lex Cryptographia Financiera - Dr Jason Grant Allen
26 November 2020, by Internetredaktion
Photo: LFT
On Thursday, 26 November, 2020, from 12:30 to 13:30 (CET), Dr Jason Grant Allen, Senior Research Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, joins us to debate one of his latest projects with Professor Rosa María Lastra (QMUL), "Law, Custom, and Code: Towards a Lex Cryptographia Financiera." The LFT workshop will take place online via Zoom. Please, register here.
Their project combines two ideas: the idea of lex financiera, which one of them (R.M. Lastra) has developed over many years, and the idea of lex cryptographia, which has emerged more recently in the context of so-called “cryptocurrencies." These two ideas are prima facie at odds, most notably because lex financiera relies on more or less conventional institutional mechanisms of enforcement, whereas lex cryptographia relies on constraints “encoded” in the very architecture of digital systems. We suggest there is the need for reconciliation and indeed the possibility of synthesis, such that it is coherent to speak of a lex cryptographica financiera as an emerging branch of international economic law. In short, the lex cryptographica financiera could be said to be a body of norms—sourced from various “levels” from private networks to governments and intergovernmental organisations—that rely on or incorporate automatic enforcement mechanisms in the digital information architecture of the financial system.
Dr Jason Grant Allen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He works on the interaction of law and technology broadly, with a focus on the law of money, the interaction of law and economics, the application of social ontology in jurisprudence, and the interface between private law and constitutional law theory. Jason holds a BA & LLB (Hons) from the University of Tasmania, a LLM in international economic law from the Universität Augsburg (as a DAAD Scholar), a PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge (as a Poynton Scholar), and was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is a dual qualified NY Attorney and Australian Lawyer (currently non-practicing) and served as the Judicial Assistant to the Rt. Hon. Sir Geoffrey Vos, then Chancellor of the High Court of England and Wales, in 2016-2017. He holds affiliations at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the University of Tasmania. He has held research fellowships at the QMUL CCLS, the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, the UNSW Faculty of Law, and the Universität Osnabrück ELSI.
Professor Rosa María Lastra holds the Sir John Lubbock Chair in Banking Law at QMUL Centre for Commercial Law Studies and is one of the foremost experts in international financial law and is an author of several leading texts in the field. Rosa studied at Valladolid University, Madrid University, London School of Economics and Political Science and Harvard Law School (as a Fulbright Fellow).Prior to coming to London, she was Assistant Professor of International Banking at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs in New York (1993-1996). From January 1992 to September 1993 she was a consultant in the Legal Department of the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C. From 2008 to 2010 she was a Visiting Professor of the University of Stockholm.She is a member of the Monetary Committee of the International Law Association (MOCOMILA), founding member of the European Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (ESFRC), research associate of the Financial Markets Group of the London School of Economics and Political Science, member of the European Banking Institute (EBI) and member of the European Law Institute (ELI). She has served as a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, United Nations (UNCTAD) and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, among numerous other engagements.
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