Evaluating The Domestic Implementation Of International Model Laws: A Functional Framework Through India’s Cross-Border Insolvency Reforms
Sehaj Singh Dhillon, B.Com LL.B., O.P. Jindal Global University, Jindal Global Law School (JGLS)
ABSTRACT
Scholars conventionally evaluate the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross- Border Insolvency (1997) by asking whether, and how closely, an enacting state has copied its text. Once a state’s implementation choice becomes the object of study rather than its implementation text, however, that metric runs out of purchase and India’s cross-border insolvency reforms make the point starkly. Tracing a twenty-five-year policy record from the Eradi Committee (2000) through the Insolvency Law Committee’s 2018 Draft Part Z and the Cross-Border Insolvency Rules/Regulations Committee’s 2020 report, this article arrives at Section 240C of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act, 2026: a bare enabling clause under which the substantive framework remains to be written by subordinate legislation not yet notified. Neither “adoption” nor “rejection” of the Model Law usefully describes Section 240C; it is a different kind of legislative act altogether, one for which the existing comparative literature has no settled vocabulary. This article argues that conventional textual-comparison approaches cannot adequately evaluate enabling-legislation models of implementation, and proposes a three-part functional framework for doing so legislative choice, institutional design, and constitutional constraint. Applying Indian constitutional doctrine on the delegation of essential legislative functions, it argues that Section 240C’s design places genuine constitutional weight on the content of rules that have not yet been made a risk largely absent from the comparative Model Law literature to date, and the article’s central concern.
Keywords: cross-border insolvency; UNCITRAL Model Law; Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code; delegated legislation; comparative implementation; India.
