Even if sovereign immunities fail to prevent holdout litigation before a domestic court, bondholder claims may still be effectively forestalled by the operation of collective action clauses. The limits of first-generation CACs have been partially overcome, and their use in sovereign bonds is now common in the United States and is mandatory in the Eurozone. This strengthened protection for debtor sovereigns is accompanied by the introduction of accountability mechanisms that guarantee fairness in the implementation of debt workout processes. This study has concluded that the development of CACs embodies a possible balance between bondholder protection and respect for debt restructuring by sovereigns. Although a more delicate question arises when a defaulting sovereign introduces a CAC mechanism by modifying the relevant domestic law governing sovereign debt instruments, such a measure may fall within the margin of discretion exercised by the debtor sovereign as the governance organ primarily responsible for addressing its sovereign default, provided that its accountability is duly discharged in and out of courts or tribunals.

Provisional measures and anti-dumping duties shall only be applied to products which enter for consumption after the time when the decision taken under paragraph 1 of Article 7 and paragraph 1 of Article 9, respectively, enters into force, subject to the exceptions set out in this Article.

In the previous chapter, I explained that we may need to reconsider familiar formulations of fundamental principles when we apply them in new contexts. In this chapter, I ask how we might even embark on such evaluations. A traditional and commendable scholarly reflex is that we must ‘ground’ our analysis in certain and self-evident bedrock. I will show the infeasibility of this search for secure moral foundations.

I suggest a non-foundational approach, using a coherentist method: we do the best we can do with the available clues and arguments. The clues include patterns of practice, normative arguments, and casuistically-tested considered judgments. We can work with ‘mid-level principles’ to carry out fruitful analytical and normative work.

The coherentist approach accepts that our principles are human constructs, that our starting points are contingent, and that we have no guarantees of ‘correctness’. Discussion of fundamental principles is not a matter of ethical computations; it is a conversation. It is a human conversation, a fallible conversation, and nonetheless an important conversation. I also argue that coherentism offers the best explanatory and justificatory account of the method used in most criminal law theory. In other words, it is the best theory of criminal law theory.