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Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.

Print Price: $130.95

Format:
Hardback
352 pp.
6.125" x 9.25"

ISBN-13:
9780197644386

Publication date:
July 2022

Imprint: OUP US


Investment Arbitration and State-Driven Reform

New Treaties, Old Outcomes

Wolfgang Alschner

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.

Readership : Academics in international law, political science, Practitioners in international investment law, and Academics, students and practitioners interested in the empirical analysis of law and data science approaches to law.

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

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

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.

Making Sense - Margot Northey
International Investment Arbitration - Campbell McLachlan, Laurence Shore and Matthew Weiniger
International Investment Arbitration - Campbell McLachlan, Laurence Shore and Matthew Weiniger
Treaty Interpretation in Investment Arbitration - Dr. J. Romesh Weeramantry
The Future of Investment Arbitration - Edited by Catherine A Rogers and Roger P. Alford

Special Features

  • Presents an authoritative empirical analysis of the evolution of investment treaties based on a comprehensive new dataset of more than 3300 International Investment Agreements
  • Shows that, counterintuitively, newly designed investment treaties are interpreted like old ones in investment arbitration
  • Charts a way towards reforming the stock of investment treaties by focusing on the interpretation, renegotiation, and multilateral reform of old treaties and their tax regimes