This article was the Kirby lecture presented in March 2009 at the Southern Cross University in Sydney, Australia. Adrien Wing's keynote speech was in support of Australian retired Justice Michael Kirby's legacy that national courts can and should gain strength from international law. The author...

The complexity of present-day international law stands in an uneasy relation to the scheme of justice propounded by Rawls. The problems facing international lawyers may pose a conceptual threat to some of the fundamental bases upon which Rawls builds his entire theoretical edifice

The worldwide rise of the Value-Added Tax (VAT) over the last half-century is emblematic of the paradox in modern tax systems: their remarkable similarity in the face of divergent political, cultural and social systems. However efforts to introduce VAT-style taxes have frequently been...

When things go wrong, it is always good to find someone to blame. As the credit crisis started to unfold in 2007, credit rating agencies (“CRAs”) emerged as the villain – or scapegoat, one might say – for commentators and regulators alike. To sum up, observers accused CRAs of doing a...

Generally speaking, each individual jurisdiction has adopted its own approach concerning the rules on the determination of the governing law applicable in proceedings in international matters. In the international practice, arbitral panels usually distinguish four relatively autonomous areas...

This paper provides a detailed outline of most of the major features of the Australian goods and services tax (GST). As well as explaining and evaluating the operation of the GST law, the paper compares the Australian GST with the equivalent features of the European VAT. The paper was first...

In explaining the concept of centre of main interests (COMI) within the UK Cross-Border Insolvency Regulations 2006 (CBIR), the Englush court in Re Stanford International Bank over-emphasised third-party ascertainability due to an apparent lack of appreciation of the different functions...

This paper examines the economic regulation of international civil aviation with a view to debunking a number of myths surrounding it. The focus is on public international law understood in its classical construct. The economic regulation of international civil aviation came about in the...

States across Asia have long engaged in international investment treaty making, and to a lesser extent in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) proceedings. Engagement has intensified partly as bilateral investment treaties (BITs) proliferated especially from the 1990s, but also Asian states...

In 2016 and 2017, states continued their engagement with international investment law. A small minority of states displayed scepticism or tried to disengage themselves from their investment law obligations. This chapter addresses select institutional developments in international investment law...