A much repeated strand of analysis in the banking crisis has been the issue of financial engineering gone wrong. Problems are attributed to innovative financial products so complex that risk and even ownership became untrackable. Characterising the financial products and transactions that led to the crisis primarily as financial engineering, however, tends to gloss over the other innovative skills and creative participants involved in their construction. This paper demonstrates that the significant practices behind the banking crisis involved not just financial engineering but legal engineering, legal engineering designed to systematically thwart regulation and bypass regulatory control. The paper, first, analyses the role of legal engineering in the banking crisis, showing it to have been a conscious strategy in which regulatory circumvention, complexity and opacity were integral parts. It then sets out some specific implications for future practice in business, government, regulation and the professions, and argues the need not just for new law and regulation, but more fundamentally for a new respect for the rule of law, for a new legal integrity, in both business and the professions.

The adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies is no longer a matter of voluntary practice on the part of business. In one sense it was never really voluntary, being in most cases a response to market pressures and reputational risk. But increasingly CSR is also subject to legal pressure and legal enforcement, not necessarily in the form of conventional state regulation but rather through indirect state pressure and through the use of private law by private actors, sometimes through highly innovative uses of law. This paper analyses and critically assesses the market forces pressing for CSR. It then demonstrates the range of mechanisms being used to foster and enforce 'voluntary' CSR through law. However it also shows a two way relationship between CSR and law with market pressures being used to press for a new sense of responsibility in how business approaches legal compliance, with the emphasis on compliance with the spirit, not just the letter of the law. The paper demonstrates a widening range of governance methods being brought into play to form a new corporate accountability.