Whereas the rational choice approach to international law has been widely accepted in legal scholarship and international relations theory, challenges to the rational choice paradigm in economic analysis of international law have hitherto not been systematically explored. Nevertheless,...

The fair and equitable treatment (FET) provision has leapt to prominence in the last 15 years as the principal ground of liability at issue in many if not most investment treaty arbitration claims. In debates about the impact of investment treaties on the right to regulate, FET is second only to...

Political Economy (PE) has been used in the national realm to understand political outcomes, including laws and jurisprudence applied to all substantive matters. PE identifies the interests of relevant actors as well as the characteristics of the institutions through which they pursue their...

This comment on Alan Sykes Article "Economic 'Necessity' in International Law" on AJIL UNBOUND discusses the application of necessity clauses from an economic perspective especially in light of the incentives of investors, who are the third party beneficiaries of the investment treaty/contract....

We study the occurrence of holdout litigation in the context of sovereign defaults. The number of creditor lawsuits against foreign governments has strongly increased over the past decades, but there is a large variation across crisis events. Why are some defaults followed by a "run to the...

Economic approaches are becoming increasingly prominent in international law. A few years ago, Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner caused a great stir with their account of The Limits of International Law, in which they argued that international law did not have any effect on state conduct. This...

Behavioral law and economics applies the conceptual tools of behavioral economics to the analysis of legal problems and legal intervention. These models, and the experiments to test them, assume an institution free state of nature. In modern societies, the law’s subjects never see this state...