Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints

Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints
Author: Gus Van Harten
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2013-10-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0191667951

Investment arbitrators rely on sovereignty for their legal status just as investor-state disputes usually stem from disagreements about the role of the state in society. As a result, investment arbitration is a vehicle for the exercise of sovereign authority and a site for contesting sovereign choices. This book investigates and evaluates the decision-making record and policy trajectory of international investment arbitration, from theoretical, doctrinal, and empirical perspectives. It analyses the extent to which the system used to resolve disputes impacts on the role of government, affecting diverse constituencies, as opposed to limiting itself to case-specific disputes between a single business enterprise and state entity. The book provides a comprehensive review of known awards in order to determine the types of government measures that have triggered disputes. It investigates how investment arbitrators have exercised their authority in recent case law. It provides a review of the approaches adopted in the reasoning of investment treaty tribunals on questions of judicial deference and respect for sovereign decision-makers. In doing so, it determines whether investment tribunals have taken a predominantly assertive approach to investor protection, without regard to their relative lack of accountability, capacity, or proximity in some cases. This approach does not sit comfortably with the relative restraint seen by domestic and international courts in similar contexts. The book argues that the unique characteristics of investment treaty arbitration make the experience of domestic judicial review more pertinent to international investment arbitration than to any other contexts for international adjudication. However, it argues that mediating devices in some form should be incorporated into the process in order to solve the tension between the extensive scope and potency of international investment arbitration as an important site of global governance, and the challenges of the review function in reviewing decisions which have strong claims to having comprehensive regulatory expertise, inclusive decision-making, electoral or other public accountability, or greater proximity to the underlying facts and context. Online Appendices

Sovereign Virtue

Sovereign Virtue
Author: Ronald Dworkin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2000
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674008106

Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution. What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.

The Trouble with Foreign Investor Protection

The Trouble with Foreign Investor Protection
Author: Gus Van Harten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-10-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0192635913

Governments are rightly discussing reform of investment treaties, and of the incredibly powerful system of 'investor-state dispute settlement' (ISDS) upon which they rest. At their core, ISDS treaties are flawed because they very firmly institute wealth-based inequality under international law. In this book, Van Harten explores these claims in the light of the history of early ISDS treaties showing their ties to decolonization and, at times, extreme violence and authoritarianism. Focusing on early ISDS lawsuits and rulings, it is revealed how a small group of lawyers and arbitrators worked to create the legal foundations for massive growth of ISDS since 2000. ISDS-based protections are examined in detail to demonstrate how they give exceptional advantages to the wealthy. Various examples are also offered of how the protections have been used to reconfigure state decision-making and shift sovereign minds in favour of foreign investors. Lastly, the ongoing efforts of governments to reform ISDS are surveyed, with a call to go further or, best of all, to withdraw from the treaties. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to know more about the shady world of investment protection.

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty
Author: Sharon R. Krause
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2015-03-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022623472X

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

Transparency in International Law

Transparency in International Law
Author: Andrea Bianchi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107021383

Analyses the hitherto unexplored issues concerning transparency in key areas of international law.

The Oxford Handbook of International Arbitration

The Oxford Handbook of International Arbitration
Author: Thomas Schultz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1025
Release: 2020
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0198796196

The Oxford Handbook of International Arbitration, A team of leading experts from across academia and practice provide an authoritative account of international arbitration, Discussion ranges from the practicalities of how arbitration technically works, to big picture analysis of the forces that underpin it, Incorporates insights from a range of disciplines beyond law, including history, sociology, literature, and economics Book jacket.

Judicial Deference in International Adjudication

Judicial Deference in International Adjudication
Author: Johannes Hendrik Fahner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1509932291

International courts and tribunals are increasingly asked to pass judgment on matters that are traditionally considered to fall within the domestic jurisdiction of States. Especially in the fields of human rights, investment, and trade law, international adjudicators commonly evaluate decisions of national authorities that have been made in the course of democratic procedures and public deliberation. A controversial question is whether international adjudicators should review such decisions de novo or show deference to domestic authorities. This book investigates how various international courts and tribunals have responded to this question. In addition to a comparative analysis, the book provides a normative argument, discussing whether different forms of deference are justified in international adjudication. It proposes a distinction between epistemic deference, which is based on the superior capacity of domestic authorities to make factual and technical assessments, and constitutional deference, which is based on the democratic legitimacy of domestic decision-making. The book concludes that epistemic deference is a prudent acknowledgement of the limited expertise of international adjudicators, whereas the case for constitutional deference depends on the relative power of the reviewing court vis-à-vis the domestic legal order.

The Standard of Review before the International Court of Justice

The Standard of Review before the International Court of Justice
Author: Felix Fouchard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2024-05-02
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1509971327

This book examines how the International Court of Justice (ICJ) reviews State behaviour through the prism of the standard of review. It develops a novel rationale to support the ICJ's application of deferential standards of review as a judicial avoidance technique, based on strategic considerations. It then goes on to empirically assess all 31 decisions of the Court in which the standard of review was at issue, showing how the Court determines that standard, and answering the question of whether it varies its review intensity strategically. As a result, the book's original contribution is two-fold: establishing a new rationale for judicial deference (that can be applied to all international courts and tribunals); and providing the first comprehensive, empirical analysis of the ICJ's standards of review. It will be beneficial to all scholars of the Court and those interested in judicial strategy.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership

The Trans-Pacific Partnership
Author: Matthew Rimmer
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2020-12-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1788973321

This book considers the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP] on intellectual property and trade. The book focuses upon the debate over copyright law, intermediary liability, and technological protection measures. The text examines the negotiations over trade mark law, cybersquatting, geographical indications and the plain packaging of tobacco products. It explores the debate over patent law and access to essential medicines, data protection and biologics, and the protection of trade secrets. In addition, the book investigates the treatment of Indigenous intellectual property, access to genetic resources, and plant breeders’ rights.

Legal Positivism in a Global and Transnational Age

Legal Positivism in a Global and Transnational Age
Author: Luca Siliquini-Cinelli
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2019-08-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3030247058

A theme of growing importance in both the law and philosophy and socio-legal literature is how regulatory dynamics can be identified (that is, conceptualised and operationalised) and normative expectations met in an age when transnational actors operate on a global plane and in increasingly fragmented and transformative contexts. A reconsideration of established theories and axiomatic findings on regulatory phenomena is an essential part of this discourse. There is indeed an urgent need for discontinuity regarding what we (think we) know about, among other things, law, legality, sovereignty and political legitimacy, power relations, institutional design and development, and pluralist dynamics of ordering under processes of globalisation and transnationalism. Making an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the subject, this volume features original and much-needed essays of theoretical and applied legal philosophy as well as socio-legal accounts that reflect on whether legal positivism has anything to offer to this intellectual enterprise. This is done by discussing whether global and transnational cultural, socio-political, economic, and juridical challenges as well as processes of diversification, fragmentation, and transformation (significantly, de-formalisation) reinforce or weaken legal positivists’ assumptions, claims, and methods. The themes covered include, but are not limited to, absolute and limited state sovereignty; the ‘new international legal positivism’; Hartian legal positivism and the ‘normative positivist’ account; the relationship between modern secularisation, social conventionalism, and meta-ontological issues of temporality in postnational jurisprudence; the social positivisation of human rights; the formation and content of jus cogens norms; feminist critique; the global and transnational migration of principles of justice and morality; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties rule of interpretation; and the responsibility of transnational corporations.