Derivatives Law and Regulation

Derivatives Law and Regulation is a comprehensive and accessible legal casebook covering futures, swaps, security-based swaps, derivatives, and similar financial products. Clear, concise, and user-friendly, it conveys an exciting and easily teachable insight into this field of law.

Now in its third edition, Derivatives Law and Regulation continues to serve as the authoritative academic reference for policymakers, commissioners and staff at independent agencies, judges, MBA and business students, commodities/futures/currency traders, journalists, and others seeking insights into and understanding of the derivatives which increasingly underpin all aspects of the U.S. and global economies.

Thoroughly updated, the third edition contains new chapters and reflects significant legal changes in the regulation of swap dealers, swap clearing, implementation of an entirely new security-based swap regulatory regime, virtual currency developments, major enforcement events, and the newly established cross-border regulatory regime.

The casebook addresses the regulatory regimes for futures, options, swaps of all varieties, foreign exchange, and virtual currency. It assumes no pre-existing knowledge of these products and provides basic introductions to what they are and their economic functions.

Key features:

• Basic economic overview of derivatives and their function, as well as descriptions of futures, forwards, options, and the most common interest rate, foreign exchange, commodity, credit, equity swaps, and blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies/virtual currencies (e.g., bitcoin, dogecoin, ethereum, and litecoin)
• Study of the jurisdiction over most derivatives conferred by the Commodity Exchange Act on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
• The role of the Securities and Exchange Commission with respect to security-based swaps
• Futures and swaps markets, the function of intermediaries, and their regulation.
• Hedge funds and private equity funds and derivatives
• Examination of public policy considerations relating to derivatives
• The role of lawyers with respect to everyday transactions
• Review of the CFTC's enforcement authority, as enhanced by the Dodd-Frank Act.
• The role of private rights of action
• Cross-border issues and the regime for their resolution
• Examination of the Bankruptcy Code's treatment of derivatives
• Comprehensive glossary of relevant terms

Gary Kalbaugh's book, Derivatives Law and Regulation...provides a gateway for students and practitioners to study and analyze derivative transactions and markets. The book's table of contents alone provides an important checklist for issues that need to be considered for every research project. The index, conversion tables, glossary and table of principal cases all provide access points to begin understanding and researching particular situations and scenarios. Kalbaugh's book enables the reader to study the trees all the while understanding the depth of the forest....His writing and analysis is concise, complete and articulate precisely because he has had to resolve these issues daily for clients and then explain them to students in the evening."

— Dean Christian Johnson, Widener University Commonwealth Law School

Derivatives Law and Regulation is an excellent reference on this evolving subject not only for the experienced derivatives lawyer, but especially for practitioners who are dipping their toes into the commodity pool for the first time and for law school professors and their students taking a derivatives law course....Derivatives Law and Regulation is a comprehensive treatise, is the most readable book on the subject and should be the go-to assigned text in law school classes."

— Futures and Derivatives Law Report