Alternative Visions of the International Law on Foreign Investment Essays in Honour of Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah

This book is about the forces that are reshaping the international law on foreign investment today. It begins by explaining the liberal origins of contemporary investment treaties before addressing a current backlash against these treaties and the device of investment arbitration. The book describes a long-standing legal-intellectual resistance to a neo-liberal global economic agenda, and how tribunals have interpreted various treaty standards instead. It introduces our reader to the changes now taking place in the design of a range of familiar treaty clauses, and it describes how some of these changes are now driven not only by developing and emerging economies but also by the capital-exporting nations. Finally, it explores the life, career and writings of Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah, a scholar whose work has been dedicated to the realisation of many of these changes, and his views about the hold global capital has over legal practice.

Preface; Acknowledgements; List of treaties, national legislation, cases and awards; Part I: 1. The worm's view of history and the twailing machine C. L. Lim; 2. The liberal vision of the international law on foreign investment Kenneth J. Vandevelde; 3. Caveat investors - where do things stand now? Leon Trakman and David Musayelyan; Part II: 4. Reforming the system of international investment dispute settlement Gus Van Harten; 5. The paranoid style of investment lawyers and arbitrators: investment law norm entrepreneurs and their critics David Schneiderman; 6. The COMESA Common Investment Area: substantive standards and procedural problems in dispute settlement Peter Muchlinski; 7. Lessons from the negotiations of the United Nations Code of Conduct on Transnational Corporations and related instruments Karl P. Sauvant; Part III: 8. India and investment protection Aniruddha Rajput; 9. China-US BIT negotiation and the emerging Chinese BIT 4.0 Wenhua Shan and Hongrui Chen; Part IV: 10. Regulating foreign investment: Methanex revisited Kyla Tienhaara and Todd Tucker; 11. The new frontier: economic rights of foreign investors versus government policy space for economic development Howard Mann; 12. Giving arbitrators carte blanche - fair and equitable treatment in investment treaties Nathalie Bernasconi-Osterwalder; Part V: 13. Is the umbrella clause not just another treaty clause? Chin Leng Lim; 14. Internationalisation and state contracts: are state contracts the future or the past? Jean Ho; Part VI: 15. State capitalism and sovereign wealth funds: finding a 'soft' location in international economic law Jiangyu Wang; Part VII: 16. The many-headed hydra and laws which rage of gain, a chapter in conclusion C. L. Lim; Index.

C. L. Lim is Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, Visiting Professor at King's College London and, in 2015, Lionel A. Sheridan Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore. He practices as a barrister from Keating Chambers, London and has advised sovereign nations and private clients in public and private international law matters and disputes. His latest publications include International Economic Law after the Global Crisis: A Tale of Fragmented Disciplines (Cambridge, 2015), The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Quest for a Twenty-First-Century Agreement (Cambridge, 2012) and articles in the McGill Law Journal, the Stanford Journal of Law, Business and Finance, and the Law Quarterly Review. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, Harvard Law School, Massachusetts and the University of Nottingham.