Maps of World Financial Law - 6th edition

Description:

BOOK REVIEW

MAPS OF WORLD FINANCIAL LAW

6th edition

The Law and Practice of International Finance Series



By Philip Wood



ISBN: 978-1-847-03342-0



THOMSON SWEET & MAXWELL

www.thomsonreuters.com

 

GETTING THE FINANCIAL GLOBAL PICTURE:

Professor Wood’s great maps on international finance law

An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers



Philip Wood has the special ability to make the most difficult sound easy and he does this brilliantly with his global law maps for the world’s financial law. This heavy and very glossy book is part of his magnificent law and practice of international finance series of books which explores the mysteries of how finance operates in the world’s different jurisdictions. The maps make a great companion to the university edition of the law and practice of international finance for anyone studying this area of law and economic policy.

CLARIFYING KEY CONCEPTS

What is particularly attractive about the maps (apart from full colour!) is the structure, detail and scholarship. It has three purposes: to help those who are concerned with comparative financial law on a global scale as an aid to economists with limited availability to accurate legal data; to set out a new set of criteria for a classification (taxonomy) of legal systems in world financial law; and to rate or grade legal systems on particular legal issue. Throughout Professor Wood introduces as much objectivity as the subject allows, and the gradings given are as good as you will get.

Allen & Overy have provided valuable research and resource facilities to enable Wood to complete his endeavours with the use of an immense team of dedicated researchers tasked with finding the information and putting it in one place. He rightly says that “it needs a team to do for law what the genome project did for genes”! At the launch of new editions of his works last January, he told us to read the preface. Having done so, a picture emerged of how Wood can educate with such ease as he does here with his team.

This is the sixth edition with 25 chapters with summaries at the beginning of each chapter, and an excellent detailed bibliography at the back- but the maps should be used with care. It is difficult enough to know about our own jurisdiction, and even more difficult to know about others. Wood tells us that one map effectively took ten years to construct and yet ‘it still does not cover all 320 jurisdictions’. He hopes that future editions will build up a more comprehensive set of maps to portray what is actually happening today in our world as financial flows are much bigger than trade flows so the amounts involved in international finance are truly enormous.

As we would expect, this book of maps is the visual representation of the knowledge and works of Professor Philip Wood built up over the years here and abroad, and is rightly the perfect visual tool for international finance for the student and the practitioner. It is the academic forerunner of what all students ask as their first questions when embarking on legal or economic studies: what is our jurisdiction and where do we fit in?

Look no further, as this work is the only available series of maps and charts explaining the information in its simplest pictorial form from the acknowledged master international finance law….and we wish we had it when we were students.

 

ISBN: 978-1-847-03342-0