Description

About the Seminar

Changing dynamics of legal risks in the financial sector’ was a topic widely studied after the 2007-2009 financial crisis. At that time, the focus was on the systemic effects of sources of risk mainly already acknowledged, but which had been considered confined within individual actors or markets. The novel special focus on systemically relevant systems and entities was possibly the main product of the elaboration of those years.

Nowadays, we are facing again changing dynamics of legal risk: technological innovation strongly affects financial services, products and business models, permitting the entry of new actors and the insurgence of new services. New sources of legal risk thus rise. Today, even traditional legal concepts connected to property and entitlement to things have uncertain application. Decentralized schemes partially change the legal characters of intermediation. Dynamism inherent to novel business models, whose main membership or working structure is subject to continuous change, makes uncertain even where a specific activity has been performed or an asset is located. These and other elements ‘change the dynamics of legal risk’ and require new thinking.

Against such backdrop, global standards and principles play a substantive role towards standardization, adoption of a functional approach permitting similar treatment of analogous risk-taking activities under differing legal systems, and methods to select applicable law. The lecture will address all these new challenges through the lenses of the most significant international instruments for the unification of private law in the financial sector.

About the Speaker

Maria Chiara Malaguti was appointed President of UNIDROIT in August 2020. She is the first woman to be appointed to this position.

She is a Full Professor of International law at Università Cattolica Sacro Cuore (Milan/Rome, Italy), and since 2003 she has been legal advisor to the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs on trade matters, including harmonisation of law and investment issues, and to the World Bank, where she has carried on legal reforms in financial markets in about fifty different countries.

Maria Chiara also practices as a lawyer in Rome, and her main areas of practice are trade and investment law, commercial law, antitrust, and conflicts of law and jurisdiction.

Maria Chiara holds degrees in law and in economics, an LLM from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

She has various publications, mainly focusing on trade law, financial markets and the harmonization of laws. In the past, she has been legal assistant and chief of cabinet at the European Court of Justice and senior legal counsel at the European Central Bank.