Simon Lester

Senator Al Franken recently sponsored an amendment to proposed legislation approving the Keystone pipeline that would require the pipeline be built with only American steel and other inputs.  Specifically, the amendment stated: "to the maximum extent consistent with the obligations of the United States under international trade agreements, none

Call for Papers: International Colloquium "Current Issues of Agricultural Law in a Global Perspective", Pisa, September 17-18, 2015 Venue: Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, September 17-18, 2015. Deadline for abstract: April 3, 2015 Deadline for draft paper: July 3, 2015 The Scuola Superiore Sant'

2015 ESIL Oslo Conference: Call for papers, agora proposals and posters – Deadline 31 January 2015 The 11th Annual Conference of the European Society of International Law will take place in Oslo, Norway, from 10 to 12 September 2015.  The conference will be hosted by the PluriCourts Center on the Legitimate

This is from a set of ISDS proposals for the TTIP from Jan Kleinheisterkamp and Lauge Poulsen: Comprehensive state ‘filter’ of private claims Our second patch is that home and host states should be allowed to block individual claims, if they both agree the dispute should be settled by domestic

From BIICL/IIEL: The Annual WTO Conference was originally established in 2000 through a partnership between the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) and the Institute of International Economic Law (IIEL) at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is currently organized jointly by BIICL, IIEL, and the Society

My chocolate-loving friends tell me this is outrageous and something needs to be done: Hershey filed a lawsuit in August against LBB Imports, a New Jersey company that sells specialty products from Britain, South Africa and Australia. LBB has since stopped importing the U.K. brands that Hershey objected

I don't read absolutely everything there is to read on ISDS, so maybe this proposal from U.S. Rep. Sander Levin is out there already and has been dicussed to death, but it was new to me: TPP should include several new provisions to protect the rights of

This is from University of Chicago law prof Brian Leiter: I propose to defend and explore three claims in this lecture. First, there is very little actual “law” in federal constitutional law in the United States, especially with respect to cases that end up at the U.S. Supreme Court:

The CAFTA panel set up to hear the U.S. complaint regarding Guatemala's enforcement of its labor laws has issued a procedural ruling.  The basic question was, "how the panel should address, as a matter of procedure, a request by Guatemala for a preliminary ruling"?  Guatemala

The European Commission issued its report today on the public consultations it carried out on ISDS.  (A fact sheet is here; press release is here). Commissioner Malmström held a press conference, but there didn't seem to be much interest.  (I think you can watch it here).  Only two