| Summary: | Tensions created by continuous disruption in the financial landscape leading to increased market convergence have suddenly rekindled the age long philosophical dispute between ‘form’ and ‘function’ as it relates to the conflict between indigenous and received legal traditions. This research tests these competing theories in the conceptualisation of securities. The formalist explanation considers the degree of institutional influence a sole reliance on legal texts play in achieving statutory coherence and utility; such as applying the strict interpretation of legal letters to reduce the uncertainties of contexts. By contrast, the functional explanation captures the limitation of legal texts without an examination of contexts. Therefore, statutory design and definition must seek to operationalise the outcomes of historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural contexts in its formation. This research raises the hypothesis that formalism places significant constraints on the language of statute to optimise products development, while functionalism enables the aggregation of legal and non-legal themes to create products. It goes further to tests these hypotheses on critical literature review and on a data set of regulatory agencies and market participants in Nigeria. It explores the conflicts created and how they continuously erode the underlying conceptual structure of securities. The research finds strong support for the functionalist context sensitive explanations. Therefore by developing and proposing a functional court-centred context-sensitive model as solution, this research suggests that formalist structure contributes to definitional incoherence of securities and places significant constraints on the capacity of language to optimise securities laws for increased product development in capital markets. The research further stresses the usefulness of real world semantics within language philosophy in shaping representionality of legal texts by providing a basis for the context sensitive conceptualisation. Through the use of focused group case study research technique, the thesis identified the legal obstacles to the conceptualisation of securities in the Nigerian Capital Market. It clarifies the place of negotiability, transferability and circularity components within the context of securities concepts of rights and duties. This is with a view to unearthing the legal nature of negotiable risk that sits at the core of securities. The research proposes a context sensitive definition of securities for the Nigerian Capital Market to replace the current definition in Section 315 of Investment and Securities Act 2007.
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