Keith Crawford
Research Topic
Insolvency and the Plague: effective redistributive justice during financial crisis
Insolvency is like the Plague. It is a contagious crisis resolved either by death or cure. Whether localised crisis, such as serious mismanagement, bad faith and betrayal, ill health or the obsolescence of an industry, or national crisis, recessions, depressions, credit crunches and systemic failure, hardship is an inevitable consequence.
The failure of companies is thus associated with job losses, unsatisfied debts, contagious effects on other businesses and broader economic woes. The complexity of crisis, and the intermingling of the internal and the external, makes determining both fault and best outcome exceedingly difficult.
A good insolvency law might limit the harm to those who have caused it, and keep it from those who have not merited it. It might also seek to efficiently redistribute assets to those best placed to make good use of them. These two objectives are often considered to be in conflict. How do we design an insolvency regime that not only achieves these contrasting goals, but is good for boom and bust?
Starting with a comparative analysis of the divergence between French and English approaches to insolvency, and their responses to recent financial crisis, this thesis takes a socio-legal approach to the law and economics of business failure, applying empiricism to explore the behavioural impact of and pressures upon insolvency law. The virtue of a mixed methodology is that it permits a highly practical approach to insolvency. We may want best returns for creditors, but what do we actually have to do to achieve them? How do we know when the law has worked? What is the difference between the law on paper and the law in practise?
First, we consider insolvency as crisis. Because it operates at a hysteric extreme it skews normal behaviour and creates paradoxical responses that appear to defy rationality. Banks runs, stock market collapses, and property bubbles are all examples of apparently irrational behaviour ordered by this contingency of the extreme. This makes insolvency law unsuitable to the sort of social re-ordering for which it is often used.
Second, how the law as a mechanism works to restore and maintain confidence, and its benefits and limits as a method. We contrast the success of law as a means of establishing authority and control with its limitations as a means of achieving future economic outcomes. In particular this focuses on a shift in the role of legal certainty.
Third, the operation of price and credit in the market for failure, and the impact of the banks. We reconsider the notion of insolvency as a battle between injured parties, and insolvency law as a battle between protection and punishment, by introducing the homogenising force of an oligopolous banking sector. This suggests a strong need to re-examine some of the economic principles typically used to analyse the impact of regulation on the market.
These ideas are brought together in a consideration of how insolvency regulation operates in a global market, and the suggestion that it is systemic rather than outcome certainty that promotes effective reallocation (whether through rescue or liquidation). Therefore a more effective redistributive regime can be achieved by moving away from specific objectives for companies in crisis, such as preserving jobs, maximising returns to creditors, or removing fraudulent directors, towards systemic certainty, such as clear commercial structure and hierarchy, enforcement of stakeholder led solutions, independent specialist commercial courts, and a focus on swift resolution even at the expense parties traditionally considered to be vulnerable and meriting protection.
Academic Qualifications
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Academic qualifications
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Awarding institution
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MA Socio-legal Research
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University of Nottingham
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LLB Law
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University of Nottingham
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Naval Graduate Academics
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Britannia Royal Naval College
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Cert HE Drama, Film, Television and Theatre Studies
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Roehampton Institute London
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Brief career history
Keith began his working life as a deck boy on merchant ships in the English Channel, before winning a commission as an officer in the Royal Navy in 1999. In 2001 he was injured while training as a military diver, and spent six years using a wheelchair. While rehabilitating he wrote and directed pieces of theatre, and ran a small business. After his medical discharge in 2004 he used his resettlement package to study at the University of Nottingham School of Law, where he also became the first person to complete his football coaching badges from a wheelchair with the Nottinghamshire FA. He won an Economics and Social Research Council to complete a Doctorate, learned to speak French, and now conducts comparative research between England and France. Keith works principally in the field of the law and economics of banking, credit and corporate insolvency, but is interested in most areas of commercial and corporate law.
Conference papers given
Conference papers given
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Sep 2010
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Forum Shopping and the Global Benefits of Soliciting Insolvency
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“INSOL International Insolvency Conference”, Nottingham Trent University
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May 2010
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Power, Replication and Certainty: Problems with the Use of Econometrics in Law
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“Beyond Law”, Osgood Hall, Toronto, Canada
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Nov 2009
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Echoes of the Palais: The Architecture of Authority in French Legal Methodology
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“Architecture and Justice”, University of Lincoln
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Dec 2004
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Soldiers, Hotdogs and Little Blue Cards: The gap between Peacekeeper and Lawmaker
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“Peacekeeping in the 21st Century”, Joongbu University, South Korea
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Publications
Aug 2008 - Robert Peston Ate My Bank: How Perceptions of Risk, Failure and Insolvency Created the Northern Rock Bank Crisis - Available at SSRN.
Other information
Keith earned his Further and Adult Education Teaching Certificate in 2004, completed two years of training in Advanced Quantitative Methodology with the Methods and Data Institute in Nottingham, and has significant leadership and management experience.
Future plans
Keith began his Bar Practitioner’s Training Course part-time at BPP in September 2011. Upon qualifying he intends to continue developing his academic research alongside consultancy and work at the Bar, whether in-house, with chambers in London or a cabinet in Paris.