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Adopting a systemic, evidence-based, and interdisciplinary perspective, this book provides a holistic account of how states have changed the investment regime through their evolving treaty practice, how investment arbitration tribunals have rolled back changes by interpreting new treaties like old ones, and how states and tribunals can successfully modernize the investment regime by reading and reforming old treaties in light of new ones.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Table of Cases
- Introduction
- Part I: State-Driven Reform
- Chapter 1. Treaties as Data
- Chapter 2. Change as Gap-filling
- Chapter 3. Evolution as Americanization
- Part II: New Treaties, Old Outcomes
- Chapter 4. Reversing Innovation through MFN
- Chapter 5. Overriding Differences through Custom
- Chapter 6. Perpetuating Mistakes through Precedent
- Part III: New Treaties as Anchor Points
- Chapter 7. Forward-Looking Interpretation
- Chapter 8. Data-Driven Renegotiation
- Chapter 9. Tax-Style Multilateralization
About the author
Wolfgang Alschner is an empirical legal scholar specialized in International Economic Law and Legal Data Science. He holds a PhD in International Law from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, and a Master of Laws from Stanford Law School. Since 2017 he has been a Faculty Member of the Common Law Section of the University of Ottawa, Canada, with cross-appointment to the Faculty of Computer Science. He teaches International Economic Law, Legal Research Methodology and Data Science for Lawyers in French and English and runs the uOttawa LegalTech Lab.
Summary
States' efforts to reform the international investment regime have triggered an arbitral backlash. In response to shortcomings of earlier investment agreements, states concluded a new generation of investment treaties that actively balances investment protection obligations with host country policy space. These new-generation agreements are more comprehensive, more precise, and include novel features such as general public policy exceptions. This book reviews the first set of awards rendered under those agreements and finds that new treaties have produced old interpretive outcomes in investment arbitration, and undermine state-driven investment reforms.
Adopting a systemic, evidence-based, and interdisciplinary perspective, the book leverages new data that comprehensively reflects regime dynamics, employs state-of-the-art technology including legal data science to treat the text of more than 3000 investment agreements as data, and draws from a range of theoretical frameworks spanning from law and economics to complexity science. The result is a new and authoritative empirical account of the evolution and current state of the international investment regime.
Additional text
This monograph will be most useful for academics who want to sharpen their understanding of investment treaty practice and government officials who seek to add to their toolbox. With his book, Alschner has written amajor contribution to the evolving debate on investment treaty reform. He meaningfully combines data science, doctrinal analysis and policy recommendations to dissect what he considers foundational shortcomings of investment law and constructively charts ways forward. For anyone interested in the future of international investment law there is no way around this book.
