A Canadian Perspective on Fifty Years of International Economic Law

Fifty years ago, “international economic law” was not a commonly used expression, much less a recognized academic discipline. In 1970, a relatively small group of legal scholars worldwide including a few Canadians were engaged in disparate areas of research that touched on legal rules for international economic activity. While the GATT and investment protection might be covered as units in a general survey course in public international law, there were no courses on IEL as a distinct subject or IEL graduate programs at Canadian law schools and few elsewhere. There were no specialized IEL journals. Today, IEL has evolved into a well-recognized area of legal enquiry, though its boundaries are not clear or agreed. Globalization of trade and investment activity and the concomitant proliferation of trade and investment treaties over the last 50 years have been key drivers of academic interest in IEL and its transformation. The very prominent role and active use of dispute settlement at the World Trade Organization (WTO) as well as investment treaty arbitration have made IEL one of the most dynamic areas of international law. International economic law dispute settlement itself has become an increasingly important subject of enquiry. The expansion in trade and investment activity and the treaty network that governs it have led to significant academic debate regarding the role of both in relation to the protection of the environment and health, as well as Indigenous, labour, and human rights, development, and other policy priorities. In turn, these subjects are increasing being addressed in trade and investment treaties. Over time, IEL scholarship has become increasingly sophisticated and methodologically diverse, embracing a wide range of theoretical and critical perspectives as well as empirical and inter-disciplinary analysis. This paper surveys the development of international trade and investment law as part of IEL from roughly 1970 to 2021 from a Canadian point of view. It begins with some definitional considerations followed by a survey of the key changes to international economic activity and the increasingly dense global network of trade and investment treaties that govern it. The remainder of the paper provides an overview of the evolution of IEL as a discipline focussing on developments in methodology and theory