The contemporary international investment legal regime represents the perfect embodiment of commercial cosmopolitanism. Foreign investors are protected by a thickening web of bilateral (and trilateral) investment and trade treaties that provide for expansive property rights backed by secluded,...

In debates over the democratic deficit of international institutions, transparency is usually the legitimacy criteria most easily satisfied. It is therefore a sign of the ongoing legitimacy crisis within international investment arbitration that this element has remained so elusive. While some...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been commonly understood as national targets. This interpretation has fostered the critique that the framework favours complacent middle-income countries, discriminates against low-income countries, provides a poor national planning tool and generally...

Until recently, qualititative methods have been dominant in human rights practice. Nonetheless, the field has not been immune from the global shift towards quantitative measurement and the community of human rights activists, professionals, officials and scholars has begun to explore ways in...

In Nepal, poverty is highly correlated with an individual's ethnicity, caste, language, religion or membership in an indigenous group. In the drafting of the new Constitution, many have called for inclusion of socio-economic and affirmative action rights in order to address social inequalities....

No longer the poor cousin of civil rights, socio-economic rights have steadily found a place in constitutions and jurisprudence across the world. Asia represents, however, a paradox in this development. While the sub-region of South Asia was the site of many early social rights adjudication...

Is it time to end the practice of double hatting in international adjudication? In this ESIL Reflection, we examine the practice of double hatting in the specific context of international investment arbitration. We ask three questions: how widespread is the practice; when is it a problem; and what...

The divide between hard law and soft law approaches to global regulation of corporations in relation to human rights is partly based on empirical assumptions. Taking a step back, we assess the claims concerning the current state of global regulation and political feasibility of hard law...

The development of the modern investment treaty regime represents a remarkable extension of international law in the post-war period. However, the development of this regime has precipitated a backlash from some states, various civil society actors, and scholars over the past decade. For all...

The growth in the signing of international investment agreements (IIAs) in the period 1990 to 2009 can be characterised as an international public policy bubble. Like the rise of privatisation at the domestic level, the expansion of this international treaty regime was arguably premised on an...