The facility that many of us now can be authors and disseminators to the world at large of our own thoughts and opinions is a truly distinguishing feature of modern times. In terms of the potential to liberate public discourse from the confined news agenda and narratives on offer from corporate news organisation, there are clear gains to a self-governing democracy, Ian Cram explains more.

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The global financial crisis of 2008-2009 resulted in a flood of litigation concerning financial collateral much of it connected with the collapse of Lehman Brothers International (Europe) as well as attempts to reform the law and regulatory practice to avoid institutions seeking state support in the future as being ‘too big to fail’.   Financial collateral has become a crucial tool to enable market participants and central counterparties to manage credit risk. Its use will grow further as the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (‘EMIR’) is implemented. Both centrally cleared and non-centrally cleared transactions will need to be supported by collateral. The law of financial collateral, particularly in cross-border transactions, is relatively new deriving in Europe from the European Financial Collateral Directive (‘FCD’) implemented in the UK by the Financial Collateral Arrangements (No 2) Regulations 2003 (‘FCARs’). Geoffrey Yeowart and Robin Parsons explain some of the questions arising.

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Intellectual property is in global turmoil. This is not surprising. In many industrialized countries, ‘intangible’ assets make up 70% or more of the economy, and intellectual property rights (IPRs) are a way to create incentives to generate those assets and then to protect those assets. Susy Frankel and Daniel Gervais go on to discuss, that from a rather obscure and technical topic for a few specialist lawyers, intellectual property since the 1980s has progressively become a major focus of business strategists, trade negotiators and developmental economists.

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