Emerging Public International Banking Law? Lessons from the Law of the Sea Experience

During the twentieth century, the law of the sea had been criticized as having a democratic deficit because the customary standards articulated in treaty-based codifications deprived modern and newer nation-states from participating in the standard-setting process.4 Some might suggest that therefore the law of the sea does not provide the best example for modern global normative processes. This Article does not opine on the merits of the democratic deficit debate regarding the law of the sea. This Article instead asserts that the modern global normative process in the financial sector area composed of the G20 and its observers (the international regulatory standard-setters) make irrelevant the democratic deficit argument raised by law of the sea critics because all relevant standard-setters are global in their constituency. The Article focuses on the process of developing global international law frameworks and, for this purpose, the law of the sea discipline is both helpful and instructive.