Alongside some other activities, I have been working on the 5th edition of Wessels International Insolvency Law Part I. It has the subtitle ‘Global Perspectives on Cross-Border Insolvency Law’, geographically covering the ‘whole world’, besides Europe. Part II covers ‘European Insolvency Law’. Both books are published by Wolters Kluwer. For the new 5th edition of Part I (the 4th edition dates from 2015) Dr. Paul Omar will be my co-author, see https://bobwessels.nl/blog/2021-02-doc3-my-book-on-international-insolvency-law/.
Participatory writing process. In the 2017 (4th) edition of Part II, I introduced a method called ‘deliberate participatory writing’. This is a writing process that aims to improve the quality of my publications and the depths of the sources used by interacting with persons active in the area of international and European restructuring and insolvency. Through my blog (www.bobwessels.nl) and via LinkedIn, since then for the creation of Part II (4th ed.) I have published in a period of some two months eight times drafts of texts of Part II with the invitation to those interested to provide me with sources of literature, precedents, court cases or additional comments to these drafts. In that period (first months of 2017), in all I received ‘likes’ from around thirty persons, all over the world, including Australia, Columbia, India and Indonesia. Substantial contributions, including references to literature, for what became the 2017 4th edition of Part II I received from Gert-Jan Boon and Olga Korneeva (Leiden Law School), Ilya Kokorin (St Petersburg; Leiden Law School), Grégory Minne (Luxembourg), Lukas Schmidt (EBS University, Wiesbaden), prof. Horst Piekenbrock (University of Heidelberg), whilst Nicoló Nisi (Bocconi University, Milan) provided me with the draft text of his PhD on groups of companies in EU private international law.
Applied to full series ‘Wessels Insolventierecht’. This I regarded as such a success that I have adopted the process in 2018 in the 5th edition for all my Dutch volumes in the series Wessels Insolvency Law (Part I and II are parts of Volume X in that series). Also here the response from Dutch practitioners was very usefull, although not all topics covered in the Dutch series aroused attention.
What’s in it for you? You may wonder: what’s in it for me? The personal return for those who reacted to this invitation to contribute to the ‘live’ debate within the pages of my texts are the assurance that (i) you read the most recent and topical developents of a certain cross-border insolvency topic, (ii) contributions will be acknowledged and in selected cases, the emailed comments may be cited in the text together with acknowledgement of the communicator. By working this way, one could say that, through a ‘deliberative public participatory drafting process’, I was able to draw on the expertise and practical experiences of these respondents. In this way, too, a broad spectrum of jurisdictions and insights could be included. An advantage being also that the developments and views included in my books result in an illustrative and thought-provoking treatment of the themes covered in the book.
What to do? As authors we intend to finalise the text of Part I (presently over 200.000 words) as from 15 January 2022. I appreciate, however, to receive contributions preferable soon after my call (I intend to post eight invitations). Please send contributions to: info@bobwessels.nl. I am most grateful to all contributors for your support in creating an exceptional book!