Tipping the Balance: Russian Legal Culture and Cash-Settled Derivatives

In its emphasis on the legal technicalities this article is concerned with materiality of financial markets – a key theme in social studies of finance. The paper insists on the importance of local legal culture by articulating this concept in distinction to politics. Focusing on the Amendment to Article 1062 of the Russian Civil Code concerning an important class of financial products – cash-settled currency derivatives – it synthesises the insights of actor-network theory and finitism, and argues that local legal culture is a composite of both distributed agencies and interpretative acts.