This chapter suggests that political systems theory allows us to make better sense of the fragmented understanding we have today of investment law in general and of investment arbitration in particular. Relying on a theory by David Easton, the chapter presents investment arbitration as a...

This article seeks to examine the fertility, for the regulation of cyberspace, of the "pyramid-network hypothesis". This hypothesis is the conjecture that the process of how law is being created, generally, in all fields of the law, is undergoing a paradigm shift. It is moving away from a...

The article explains reasons why governmental regulation of online dispute resolution (ODR) would be so beneficial. Essentially, in order to maximize the benefits of the ODR model, the author believes that the government can and should regulate the practice. This article is different from most...

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...

International commercial courts seem quite likely to become a successful product on the dispute resolution market. But they are not merely that. They are not mechanisms resolving an array of disputes which are isolated from and have no effect on their socio-economic environment. They rather are...

In this introduction to the Special Issue "Empirical Studies on Investment Disputes", we offer a new heuristic model to structure the thinking about investment arbitration. Investment arbitration is presented here as a political system in a sense inspired by David Easton's landmark theory: it...