Recent jurisdictional decisions suggest that sovereign debt will be subject to bilateral investment treaties (BITs) for the foreseeable future. This Article demonstrates that applying BITs to sovereign bonds threatens to undermine the core economic function of those treaties by encouraging...

These remarks delivered at the 2008 ASIL meeting, critique the notion of progress as it is deployed in discussion of international law. Drawing on human rights and environmental law, this brief essay describes the disconnect between progress in enacting international law and progress in...

The paper deals mainly with the emerging legal issues related to climate change and their interlinkages with the WTO law, human rights law, investment law and environmental law. While the comprehensive international legal regime for climate change is still not established, the guidance in...

The concept of treaty abuse, although being of great significance to the operation of international tax treaties, is by no means peculiar to this particular branch of law. A treaty abuse doctrine exists in general international law since long. As this paper argues, current work within the OECD,...

Public contracting has become an increasingly important form of administrative action, so much that the modern state has been characterized as a ‘contracting state.' Yet, while public contracting increasingly takes place in globalized markets, the law governing it has been understood...

This chapter explores how the wide range of interpreters that populate international law, forming part of interpretive communities, affects interpretation in international law. To understand how interpretation in international law works in practice, we need to appreciate the role of interpretive...

Recent investment litigation against Argentina focuses attention on the necessity defense in customary international law and related provisions in investment treaties. This paper considers, from an economic standpoint, the question of when exigent economic circumstances might create conditions...

As a new international economic policy, microtrade will face a whole host of issues, including potential legal cultural obstacles. Those legal cultural issues will arise as a result of the different and sometimes conflicting legal cultures of the varied participants within the different fora and...