Soft law instruments in restructuring and insolvency law: exploring its rise and impact

Soft law instruments are increasingly prevalent in the area of procedural and substantive restructuring and insolvency law. These instruments, all embodied in legally non-binding texts, originate from so-called standard-setting organisations, such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Working Group V (Insolvency) and the World Bank, as well as mainly insolvency practitioners’ organisations, such as INSOL International and INSOL Europe. Ambiguity of what they are and how they impact hard law has blurred the actual role that these soft law instruments have. This raises questions of how soft law instruments can be (legally) characterized, what advantages and disadvantages they have (compared to hard law), and how legislators and policy makers in the field of restructuring and insolvency make use of them.