Judicial economy and moving bars in international investment arbitration

Leslie Johns (), Calvin Thrall () and Rachel L. Wellhausen ()
Additional contact information
Leslie Johns: UCLA
Calvin Thrall: University of Texas at Austin
Rachel L. Wellhausen: University of Texas at Austin

The Review of International Organizations, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, No 7, 923-945

Abstract: Abstract Historically, international investment law has centered on protecting foreign investors from direct expropriation, but much of modern law includes legal standards that allow investors to win compensation for other kinds of investor-state disputes. A prominent criticism among scholars and policy advocates is that modern legal protections allow investors to pursue increasing numbers of frivolous, low-merit cases. We contend that this claim overlooks the impact of judicial economy and changing legal standards: since foreign investors only need to prove a main legal violation to secure compensation, arbitrators can and do rule only on those standards that are most easily proven, in particular, contemporary legal protections. As a result, measures based on legal claims and rulings cannot provide definitive evidence of merit, and fears about trends in frivolous litigation under international investment law may be overstated.

Keywords: Investor state dispute settlement; International investment arbitration; International law; International investment agreements; Judicial economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11558-019-09364-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:revint:v:15:y:2020:i:4:d:10.1007_s11558-019-09364-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... iology/journal/11558

DOI: 10.1007/s11558-019-09364-y

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of International Organizations is currently edited by A. Dreher

More articles in The Review of International Organizations from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().