The use of arbitration in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) enables foreign investors to sue host states for alleged breaches of international investment law. But the practise has grown increasingly controversial over the past decade, with respondent states refusing to pay damages, or...

Remedies in international law present an intriguing challenge: what happens if a sovereign state refuses to comply with its obligations, even after an international adjudicatory body has ruled in its disfavour? The absence of compulsory enforcement arguably means that international law as a...

Have investors used NAFTA Chapter 11 to thwart the fair application of environmental protection measures? Are the compensation awards discouraging governments from taking environmental protection measures they would otherwise want to take? This report empirically reviews four arbitrations under...

Extractive industries can bring much-needed jobs to remote locations in developing countries. At the same time, there are too many examples where extractive projects bring environmental degradation and human rights violations. Some research has pointed out that the difference between an...

There is an interesting exception to businesses’, employers’, and service providers’ seemingly universal embrace of arbitration processes, particularly mandatory pre-dispute arbitration. Although it may be difficult to believe given arbitration’s current popularity, not everyone requires...

Economic theory has made considerable progress in explaining why sovereign countries cooperate in trade. Central to most theories of trade cooperation are issues of self-enforcement: The threat of reprisal by an aggrieved party maintains the initial balance of concessions and prevents...

I propose a framework within which to interpret and evaluate the major reforms introduced to the GATT system in its transition to the WTO. In particular, I examine the WTO Agreement on Safeguards that has replaced the GATT escape clause (Article XIX), and the Dispute Settlement Process (DSP)...

The WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) has been hailed as a fundamental aspect of the Multilateral Trading System for developing countries. At the same time developing countries face many challenges to ensure their effective participation in the mechanism. This paper presents statistical...

This article explores the still-controversial role of arbitrators in settlement facilitation and whether the professional guidelines put forward supposedly to assist arbitrators in this role take into account the psychological factors at play. Do “best practice” guidelines address the...

SOME authors have called for enhancing the government's role in promoting Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) due to its slow growth. The problem with ODR seems to be the lack of confidence in the technology itself or the law that governs ODR. To cure these problems, authors think that government...