Since the inception of the international investment law system, investment promotion and protection have been the raison d’être of investment treaties and states have confined their policy space in order to attract foreign investment and protect their investors abroad. Languishing in relative...

Over the last few years, the right to regulate has evolved from a rather inconspicuous, mistrusted concept to a necessary component of international investment agreements. This brief study offers a complementary account of the right to regulate compared to the author’s treatment of the topic a...

On November 14, 2013, Professor Dervan was called to testify before the United States House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary Over-Criminalization Task Force. Available here is his written testimony. In his written testimony, Professor Dervan examines the phenomenon of...

In the United States insurance is regulated both by state insurance commissions and class action litigation. The interaction of these two systems has not been extensively studied. We examine four different facets of the regulation litigation tradeoff. The first is to examine whether a...

Because third-party funding and sales of legal rights are equivalent in terms of their economics, I examine arrangements in which third-party sales of legal rights are permitted today – waiver, subrogation, and settlement agreements. The existing arrangements provide valuable lessons for the...

This paper, an edited and footnoted transcript of a presentation at a research Centre of Excellence at Hokkaido University, looks at the influence of “responsive regulation” theory on the large-scale “Australian Consumer Law” reforms enacted in 2010. It outlines some frameworks developed...

In this paper, intended as a chapter for a study book, attention is given to the notion of harmonisation, its operation in the area of private law and the extent to which harmonisation of private law rules contributes to the development of the internal market

With the passage of the Internet Gambling Ban of 2006, Congress envisioned a complete prohibition on online poker and online gambling in general. Instead, this hastily passed law has created more confusion than it has cured. By failing to acknowledge jurisdictional problems associated with this...

This chapter was presented at a conference in Dublin on the (then) new Rome I Regulation of the European Union in the fall of 2009. It contrasts the Rome I rules on party autonomy with those in the United States. In particular, it considers the rules in the Rome I Regulation that ostensibly...