Innovation and the State Finance, Regulation, and Justice

From social media to mortgage-backed securities, innovation carries both risk and opportunity. Groups of people win, and lose, when innovation changes the ground rules. Looking beyond formal politics, this new book by Cristie Ford argues that we need to recognize innovation, and financial innovation in particular, as a central challenge for regulation. Regulation is at the leading edge of politics and policy in ways that we have not yet fully grasped. Seemingly innocuous regulatory design choices have clear and profound practical ramifications for many of our most cherished social commitments. Innovation is a complex phenomenon that needs to be understood not only in technical terms, but also in human ones. Using financial regulation as her primary example, Ford argues for a fresh approach to regulation, which recognizes innovation for the regulatory challenge that it is, and which binds our cherished social values and our regulatory tools ever more tightly together.

1. Innovation as a regulatory challenge: four stories; 2. The history and rots of flexible regulation; 3. Flexible regulation: key scholarship; 4. Flexible regulation scholarship, 1980–2012; 5. Flexible regulation and ideology; 6. Innovation as regulatory subject; 7. Seismic innovation; 8. Innovation as sedimentary layers; 9. Conclusion.

Cristie Ford is Associate Professor and Director at the Centre for Business Law, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia. She is an internationally recognised scholar in the fields of financial regulation and regulatory theory. She has written, lectured and consulted extensively on financial regulation and was previously editor of the journal Regulation and Governance. She is also a co-author of the leading securities regulation text in Canada.