Investor-State Arbitration

Via a Luke Peterson tweet, I see that Uruguay is planning to weaken its anti-tobacco law (see this old post for more), in response to a Phillip Morris investment treaty challenge: Uruguay's government yesterday said it would tweak the legislation, or possibly draft a new law, to fend

Trade lawyer Lawrence Herman talks about the local versus federal aspect of investor-state rulings: All of this raises the question as to how the federal-provincial aspects of Chapter 11 reviewed in this article will play out and how the two levels of government will deal with these issues in the

Australia's Productivity Commission has prepared a draft report on Bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements.  You can read it just for your own pleasure, but note that they are looking for input, so feel free to give them comments (by Friday 10 September 2010.)  Here are the draft recommendations.

As mentioned in the last post, a European Commission policy paper and draft regulation on investment policy were on their way.  They are now available here and here.  Here's what the policy paper says about investor-state: (d) Enforcing investment commitments Ensuring the effective enforceability of investment provisions is

The European Commission announces the following today: The European Commission today took the first step towards a comprehensive European international investment policy with two initiatives. A policy paper lays out how the new EU competence on foreign direct investment can be used to boost competitiveness and trade resulting in growth

From Gus Van Harten, Five Justifications for Investment Treaties: A Critical Discussion, posted on SSRN.  Here's the abstract: The article examines five common justifications for the investment treaty system in order to highlight aspects of the system that give cause for concern. First, it examines whether investment treaties

From a recent EU DG Trade civil society meeting on trade and investment: Jean François Brakeland debriefed on the state of play of the preparatory work conducted by the Commission in order to implement the EU exclusive competence on FDI, as conferred by the Lisbon Treaty. He started his presentation

From Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club: As we wait for President Obama's speech tonight on the oil catastrophe in the Gulf, it's important to understand that many of the options he has discussed -- from requiring BP to set funds aside in escrow for

From Jason Yackee, on SSRN, a new paper entitled "Do Bilateral Investment Treaties Promote Foreign Direct Investment? Some Hints from Alternative Evidence": In this article I present a multi-method examination of whether bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, are likely to promote inflows of foreign direct investment. Using regression