Drawing on the case brought against El Salvador by Pacific Rim, the author examines the tension in international investment law between encouraging stability and allowing adaptation to new circumstances and raises a number of resulting concerns about the international arbitration process.

Investment treaty arbitration appears to be a boy's club. Just 4% of individuals appointed as arbitrators in known cases to May 2010 were women. This casts doubt on the system's ad hoc and partly-privatized appointments process. A roster-based model would enable a more deliberative and...

This Perspective summarizes recent research on how investment treaty arbitrators have used their power to review sovereigns. It suggests a need for more scrutiny of arbitrators' performance by other actors, such as national associations of legislators or judges.

The Canada-China BIT requires Canada to open its economy to Chinese investors, while allowing China to retain a closed economy and to keep discriminating against Canadian investors. The treaty also facilitates confidential settlements and sacrifices a longstanding safeguard for Canada's...

The discussion in this paper elaborates a tiered set of reforms designed to (1) protect foreign investment, while (2) affording appropriate policy space for governments to develop and regulate their economies in a sustainable manner and (3) ensuring equitable governance of investment disputes...

The article presents a model for reform of investor-state arbitration aimed at enhancing institutional safeguards of independence in the system. The model is based on the person-to-government adjudicative mechanism in Canada's Agreement on Internal Trade. The article also summarizes the win-loss...

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...