School of Law

Event time: 14:00-15:00

Title: ‘Who Gets to Invest Safely? Structural Inequality and Investment Safety in Emerging Capital Markets’

Abstract: This article develops a law and political economy account of how structural inequality is produced in emerging capital markets. It argues that capital markets law plays a constitutive and distributive role in shaping how investment safety is allocated across different investor groups. The article draws on an original empirical study of cryptoassets exchange and custodian services providers registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority between 2020 and 2025. The findings show that the emergence of digital trading platforms has lowered physical and financial barriers for the wider public to invest. But public-facing firms are materially weaker than institutional-facing firms across three dimensions of investment safety: resilience, transparency and custody protection. These materially different conditions of participation are legally structured through the interaction of company law, financial regulation and contract. Against this background, inequality in investment safety cannot be simply perceived as a result of market risk or individual choice. Regulatory attention should therefore move from whether the wider public ought to be admitted into the market to how law can provide them with meaningful protection.

A panel discussion, bringing together government and military legal advisers alongside leading academics, to discuss critical questions related to the attribution of conduct to states, particularly during armed conflict.