The use of investment treaty arbitration to decide public law raises concerns about judicial independence and impartiality. These concerns arise from the absence of institutional safeguards of independence that are otherwise present in public law adjudication at the domestic or international...

This is a summary of two articles I produced in an extended exchange with Susan D. Franck and others in the Yearbook on International Investment Law & Policy. The exchange dealt with the role of empirical methods in testing for possible bias in investment treaty arbitration and with various...

How should a multilateral agreement on climate change include a safeguard against risks of investor-state dispute resolution (ISDS) lawsuits targeting climate change action by governments? The aim of this short report is to identify language for an ISDS carve-out that is reliable and clear...

This article reports on a study of potential systemic bias in the resolution of ambiguous legal issues by investment treaty arbitrators. It outlines tentative but significant findings that the arbitrators in general tended to favour (a) foreign investors over states in general, (b) foreign...

We collected data on the size and wealth of the foreign investors that have brought claims and received compensation due to ISDS. Our main findings are that the beneficiaries of ISDS, in the aggregate, have overwhelmingly been companies with more than USD1 billion in annual revenue –...

In late 2008, as financial markets were crashing, the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment launched the Columbia FDI Perspectives. The first Perspective, entitled “The FDI recession has begun,” correctly forecast an FDI recession in the following year. From that first...

This discussion paper elaborates on five serious flaws with proposals for investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in proposed Europe-United States and Europe-Canada trade deals known by the acronyms TTIP and CETA. The issues elaborated in the paper are: the unjustified replacement of judges...

This second edition of this publication provides an overview of important contemporary issues relating to foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational enterprises for all those who are interested in this subject, but are not always in a position to follow diverse perspectives and what is...