At the end of this book, some summarising thoughts are due. The aim of this chapter is not to repeat what has gone before, but to offer some subsequent and more general deliberations on the subject at hand.

PRINCIPLES IN OTHER LEGAL FIELDS

First, as we have seen in the second, third and fourth chapters of this book, principles of cross-border insolvency law exist. They can be distilled from present regulations on this subject matter, and can be sorted into certain groups. However, it is suggested here that basic standards can be defined for other legal fields as well. The phenomenon of underlying principles is not restricted to cross-border insolvency law, but can also be observed in many (if not all) legal contexts. Against the background of the present study, good examples are private international law and civil procedure law. It seems obvious that jurisdictional principles, as described above in Chapter 2, can be found in other cross-border relationships too. For instance, the principles of universalism or mutual trust will also be prominent in the rules of private international law and international procedural law, and the latter also receives significant input from procedural principles, as noted above in Chapter 3, such as the principles of transparency and of priority. Presumably every other legal field – be it national or international law, substantive or procedural law, constitutional or lower-level law – can be analysed for its underlying basic tenets, as has already been shown regarding European law and can certainly be shown for other subjects as well (albeit not in this book).

However, this does not mean that the principles of cross-border insolvency law as developed above are in actual fact nothing more than general legal principles applied to a specific subject. Admittedly, commonalities and overlapping can be ascertained. For instance, the principle of equality of states can certainly be dissected from other legal fields as well, if they are concerned with international and trans-border affairs and thus concern relationships among nations. The same holds true for the principle of procedural justice, which in the end is an expression of human rights and can probably be verified under the rule of law for every procedural law, be it national or international, court-driven or administrative proceedings.