Payment Law, Sanctions, and the Architecture of Economic Participation
One of the most thought-provoking questions following my presentation of “Payment Systems as Legal Infrastructure: Digital Finance and the Architecture of Economic Participation” at the 17th Transnational Commercial Law Teachers Meeting at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law concerned the power to exclude actors from essential payment networks.
The question was especially timely. When I presented the paper on October 8, reports were already emerging that the United States was preparing a new escalation of sanctions against the International Criminal Court itself. The following day, October 9, the United States formally designated the ICC as an institution, after earlier measures directed at individual judges and officials.
Today, American Society of International Law President Oona Hathaway issued a statement addressing this development.
The sequence brings into particularly sharp focus a broader question at the heart of my paper: what does it mean when participation in economic and institutional life depends upon access to payment infrastructure that can itself become an instrument of legal and geopolitical power?
Commercial law has developed highly sophisticated rules governing individual payment transactions—from authorization and allocation of losses to settlement and finality.
But increasingly digital, interconnected, and transnational payment systems require us to look beyond the individual transaction.
My paper argues that payment law is transactionally sophisticated but institutionally incomplete.
The question raised at Pitt can therefore be stated quite simply:
Who has access to essential payment infrastructure—and who ultimately has the power to determine that access?
The ICC sanctions illustrate how questions of payment infrastructure, economic participation, jurisdictional power, sanctions, and institutional dependence can become deeply intertwined.
This is precisely why I increasingly think of payment systems not merely as mechanisms through which money moves, but as part of the legal architecture through which contemporary economic participation is organized.
I am grateful for the thoughtful discussion at Pitt Law.
Ron Brand Ron Brand John Linarelli Miriam Goldby Andrea Guaccero Don Scott De Amicis Katarzyna Kryla-Cudna Ulrich G. Schroeter Ilias Ioannou Djakhongir Saidov Teresa Rodríguez de las Heras Ballell Tolulope Falokun Jenny Jingbo Zhang Lev Breydo Marcelo Marzouka Center for International Legal Education (CILE) at Pitt Law
Paolo Davide Farah, Paolo Farah
