Investment Arbitration

I have always found the submission of expert legal opinions on matters of international law to investment treaty tribunals rather odd.  Why are expert opinions needed and what is their status?  To…

In the long-running battle between Chevron and Ecuador over environmental damage, a federal court in New York has denied Ecuador's motion to stay arbitration of a Ecuador-U.S. BIT claim. In…

Following the flurry of arbitrations initiated by investors against Argentina based upon Argentine government actions during that country’s 2001-2002 economic crisis, one might have expected the U.S…

Procedural Order No. 3 (Confidentiality Order) dated 27 January 2010 in Giovanna a Beccara and others v. The Argentine Republic (the “Order”) addresses the competing considerations of confidentiality…

I recently gave a talk at a Sydney Law School conference about the unexplored relationship between bilateral investment treaties and freedom of expression. In a longer paper on BITs and human rights…

It is not easy to get a grip on the vast amount of case-law being churned out by investment treaty arbitration panels. However, if law students wanted examples of the ultimate slap-dash arguments…

I am in Australia in advance of the investment law conference at Sydney Law School at the end of the week, and I took advantage of many plane hours to read the docket in the case pending between…

ICSID has just published a report on its caseload, and there is plenty of interesting data. The one that particularly caught my attention is the chart on the basis of consent invoked to establish…

In my last post I questioned whether investor misconduct (such as fraud, illegality and corruption) is invariably a jurisdictional issue.  This post focuses on the use of admissibility as a filtering…