This is from Graham Cook:
For those interested in matters of treaty interpretation and legal reasoning, here is a new paper on "The Use of Object and Purpose by Trade and Investment Adjudicators: Convergence without Interaction". It analogizes the practice of WTO and ISDS tribunals to the story of "The Uncanny Case of the Jim Twins, Two Estranged Twins Who Led Identical Lives" (as reported in Ripley's Believe It Or Not). From the paper's conclusion:
There is a natural tendency in the literature to associate "cross-fertilization" and judicial "interaction" with "convergence", and to associate "isolation" and "fragmentation" with "divergence". In relation to certain kinds of issues, however, there appears to be the possibility of parallelism and convergence in practice without any express form of interaction and cross-fertilization, without any express reliance on prior precedent, and without any demonstrated mutual awareness of the practice of other international tribunals. This is the phenomenon of convergence without interaction.