The Doctrine of Odious Debt in International Law

Jeff King is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Laws, University College London. He was previously a Fellow and Tutor in Law at Balliol College, Oxford, and an Associate at Sullivan and Cromwell LLP, New York City. His book Judging Social Rights (Cambridge, 2012) won the 2014 UK Society of Legal Scholars Peter Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. He is Co-Editor of Current Legal Problems and the UK Constitutional Law Blog, and sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Law. His scholarship spans comparative public law, international law, and jurisprudence and political theory.

• 1. Introduction; 2. International law, sovereign debt, and odious debt; 3. The status of odious debts in international law; 4. The enforceability of odious debts in domestic law; 5. Conclusion.

'The Doctrine of Odious Debt in International Law: A Restatement is both substantively compelling and methodologically adventurous and, what is more, is published at a timely moment. In recent years, both the UN General Assembly and UNCTAD have attempted to re-organize the law and practice around sovereign debt relief. In this broader setting, King's monograph adds considerable clarity to an important aspect of the vexing issue of sovereign debts and their treatment in international law.' Jan Klabbers, Netherlands International Law Review