Simon Lester

Over at Opinio Juris, there's a post about a new book by Jens David Ohlin, called The Assault on International Law. Here's the publisher's description: International law presents a conceptual riddle. Why comply with it when there is no world government to enforce it?

This is from UK business secretary Vince Cable, in remarks at a recent cabinet meeting: Cable acknowledged there have been fears and some myths that US corporates would take the UK to secret tribunals unless all services are privatised under TTIP, but he told colleagues that a reformed investor-state

You may have forgotten it was even going on, but lingering out there, waiting to be dissected and analyzed, is the Article 21.5 dispute in U.S. - Tuna II.  This should be a very interesting test of whether an environmental measure that affects imports can be implemented in a

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