Simon Lester

If you are in or near Madrid, there is an interesting seminar on the WTO and investment arbitration, this Friday, May 22.  Details here and here: Policy development challenges with WTO dispute settlement and international arbitration: why is the interface between trade and investment relevant from a political, economic and

It is here.  No big changes from the panel report: still a violation of TBT Article 2.1, and still no violation of TBT Article 2.2.  Next up on the agenda, most likely, is an arbitration over the proper amount of retaliation. I'm trying to sort out

I've organized an ISDS debate over at Cato Unbound.  We have Jason Yackee and me as critics, and John Veroneau and Ingrid Persson as supporters.  We each write essays, and then respond to each other's points.  So far we have essays up there from me and

This is from Vox: ... Due to a section of the tax code known as 280E, many state-legal marijuana businesses have to pay taxes on basic expenses like rent, employee salaries, and utility bills — unlike other legal businesses, which are allowed to deduct these types of expenses.For some businesses,

As the current trade negotiating agenda struggles along, both at the multilateral and mega-regional levels, perhaps there are some government actions out there that could provide the basis for productive new negotiations.  One area that always gets me fired up is subsidies:  agriculture subsidies and export credits are big

Someone sent me Canada's third party submission in the WTO plain packaging dispute.  I checked with a friend who works for the Canadian government, and he said it was fine to post it, so here it is.  Here's an excerpt: 42. A finding of a right

From a Washington Post interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren: You can’t envision even in theory a way to structure ISDS that would assuage your concerns? WARREN: Once a group of independent arbiters, whose decisions cannot be appealed, can issue a money judgment of any size, then the ISDS problem

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström has just announced some new ideas on ISDS, set out in this concept paper.  One of the ideas is to move investment arbitration towards being a real "international investment court."  Along the same lines, here are some ideas coming from Germany, which also