The International Investment régime has been transformed to a vibrant and constantly evolving, yet incoherent system. A point of incoherence has been the notion of ‘investment' under the ICSID Convention for which the case-law and doctrine have remained unsettled for long. Some Respondent...

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes is an intergovernmental organisation at the core of the system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). ICSID is busier than ever with the number of cases pending at its historical maximum. However, the legitimacy of the system...

Decisions by arbitral tribunals in investment treaty cases do not have formal precedential status. Yet certain issues recur, and prior decisions at the least provide guidance to later tribunals. The content of the most frequently invoked substantive treaty provisions - the obligations to accord...

Reflecting the significant amount of foreign investment by State-owned enterprises (SOEs), a number of claims against States by SOEs have been submitted to investor-State arbitration. Such claims raise the issue of whether, for purposes of determining standing as ‘investors' in investment...

Consistency in decision-making is generally considered to be a good thing. It is largely considered to be a paradigm of good decision-making. Investment arbitrators often rely on this idea to cite prior cases (precedents, in a non-technical meaning), and follow some of them. But is consistency...

Applying his unmatched chessboard experience, Grandmaster Garry Kasparov taught that without long-term goals decisions become purely reactive and one is no longer playing her game . In International Investment Law (IIL), we may not be playing someone else's game, however, while the IIL community...

In the investment arbitration Philip Morris v. Uruguay the arbitral tribunal rejected Philip Morris' claim that Uruguay's anti-smoking legislation expropriated the tobacco company's trademarks. In its reasoning the tribunal largely deferred to Uruguay's policy decision to curtail tobacco...

Investor-state dispute-settlement (ISDS) clauses give multinational investors (corporations) a right to sue a state in a binding proceeding before an independent arbitration tribunal. This jurisgenerative right to file a claim in an international tribunal with mandatory jurisdiction is generally...