William & Mary Business Law Review
Abstract
Especially since the 2007–08 financial crisis, commentators have seized on the term “regulatory arbitrage” to describe a sprawling range of strategic compliance behavior spanning diverse sectors of the contemporary economy. Despite the term’s prevalence, there is scant agreement on the scope of activities it describes. To some, it has become a catch-all for legal avoidance from time immemorial. Such an expansive understanding obscures the context that led the term to acquire salience and fosters a fatalist view that all regulation is futile. Resisting this trend, this Article answers calls to situate regulatory arbitrage in a richer socio-historical context. Tracing the term’s expansion from its origins in deregulation-era discussions of offshore finance, it shows how economics and technology have brought calculating approaches from the periphery to the core of the compliance landscape, and how this systematically undermines our capacities for collective risk management.
Repository Citation
Ian J. Murray, The Offshore Origins of Regulatory Arbitrage, 17 Wm. & Mary Bus. L. Rev. 577 (2026), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmblr/vol17/iss3/3Included in
Banking and Finance Law Commons, International Trade Law Commons, Law and Economics Commons