Securitisation from mortgages to sustainability: circulating techniques and the financialisation of legal knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores what finance can teach us about law’s agency in global governance by tracing the global circulation of a specific technique, securitisation, from its origins in mortgage markets to its recent redeployment as a purported tool for ecological transition. It delves into legal practitioners’ literature to investigate the various legal problems that had to be addressed, and the various legal solutions that were devised, for securitisation to spread globally. Through the examination of concrete technical problems that securitisation lawyers have had to solve—concerning the constitution of special purpose vehicles, the assignment of receivables, and the construction of new asset classes—I show that what has become globalised in the field of law and finance in the past decades is not primarily a set of transnational norms or authorities, but a repertoire of legal techniques, values, and rhetoric for framing and solving legal problems: a financialised legal knowledge.