| dc.description.abstract | My doctoral thesis examines the policy of rule-use in the UK financial
regulation. Its case study is the current FSA conduct of business
regulation. It consists of two parts. Part I considers the evolution of the
policy of rule-use during the past twenty years of financial regulation
and up to the end of 2006. It argues that it has been transformed from a
rule-centric regime into an interpretation centric-regime, where
emphasis is placed on the interpretive project that makes possible the
use of regulatory requirements rather than the production of selfcontained
and static rules. Part II explores the grounds of this policy
development by looking into the nature of regulatory interpretation.
With this regard, it discusses two alternative theoretical accounts of
regulatory interpretation: the communicative thesis, which emanates
from Julia Black’s study of the use of rules in financial regulation under
the Financial Services Act 1986; and the constructive thesis, which
draws on Ronald Dworkin’s writings on the idea of law as integrity. The
communicative thesis regards regulatory interpretation as a form of
communication that is bound to fail and justifies the interpretationcentric
approach as a tactic that aims to prevent or remedy failure of
communication. The constructive thesis views regulatory interpretation
as a dialectical practice that requires the participants of the wider
regulatory community to work out the public standards (“principles”)
that govern their interrelations and explains the interpretive shift in the
policy of rule-use as an attempt to meet the demand for new and better
interpretations. The thesis concludes that the constructive thesis is
preferable, because it is better able to accommodate two fundamental
intuitions about the practice of interpretation; the intuition that the
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resolution of regulatory interpretive disputes must be the outcome of a
genuine and reciprocal commitment to a public conception of justice
and the intuition that scarce public resources should be wisely
administered rather than wasted. | en_US |
