We now have a total of more than 650 investment arbitration claims. The number of countries targeted by arbitration is on the rise, both in the developing and developed worlds, and has reached a total of more than 100 states. Given the hard economic times that most countries have been going...

Consistency in decision-making is generally considered to be a good thing. It is largely considered to be a paradigm of good decision-making. Investment arbitrators often rely on this idea to cite prior cases (precedents, in a non-technical meaning), and follow some of them. But is consistency...

Investment arbitrations should not happen too often, because they are costly processes for both parties. Yet they regularly happen. Why? We investigate the hypothesis that investment arbitrations are used as a means of last resort, after dissuasion has failed, and that dissuasion is most likely...

Investor-state arbitration, also called investment arbitration, is often accused of harming developing states facing economic hardship, for the benefit of a wealthy few from the Global North. Its proponents respond that it is the only available means to resolve disputes impartially, and that its...

Imagine two groups of people. The first group is composed of a colourful patchwork of individuals: some young, some old; some wild, some tame; some from the left, some from the right; some chagrined spirits, some solar souls; some cultivating friendship and warmth, some pursuing individuality and...

Online dispute resolution systems can be effective in a way that courts, mostly, cannot, because they operate on much smaller costs. When connected to self-enforcement mechanisms, ODR systems could create a global law without a state, a whole new, independent and transnational legal order: the...

In cyberspace, parties meet that would often not have met in the offline world, because they physically live in far-away countries or on different continents. Outside cyberspace, ordinary consumers do usually not enter international agreements. In cyberspace, they engage in small or medium...

The America's Cup is one of the most prestigious and oldest sports events in the world. The stakes involved are huge, be it only in financial terms. Moreover, it is organized in an almost entirely autonomous fashion, in the sense that the respective defender of the Cup (the sailing club that...

International arbitration entertains a particular relationship with its own literature – the written knowledge in the field and about the field. This relationship is marked by one big mix, be it in the form of competition or cooperation, of practitioners who use it, legal entrepreneurs who...