Weekend Roundup: September 28 – October 4, 2013

This week on Opinio Juris, we organized a book symposium on Investment Law in International Law: Integrationist Perspectives, edited by Dr Freya Baetens. If you enjoyed the symposium, don’t miss CUP’s offer of a 20% discount for our readers. More details are here. Freya introduced the goals of the book, followed by comments by Laurence Boisson de Chazournes.

On Tuesday, Nicolas Hachez and Jan Wouters assessed the need for an alternative to the arbitral model to preserve the public interest. Their reply to Tullio Treves’ comments is here. Vid Prislan addressed how non-investment obligations could be taken into account in investment arbitration, with comments by Kathleen Claussen.

Gleider Hernandez explored the interaction between investment law and the law of international armed conflict, which Bill Burke-White welcomed as a great opening for further research in this area. Philipp Ambach also dealt with the interaction between these two fields of international law in his post on the international criminal responsibility of transnational corporate actors doing business in zones of armed conflict, on which Judge Howard Morrison commented.

Anastasios Gourgourinis discussed the relationship between investment law and WTO law in the minimum standard of treatment of aliens, to which Anne van Aaken responded, followed by Anastasios’ reply. Mary Footer also reflected on the relationship between investment law and trade law. In response, Gabrielle Marceau discussed what dispute settlement in trade and investment systems can learn from each other. Mary’s reply is here.

On the last day, Elisabeth Tuerk and Wolfgang Alschner discussed how international investment treaties could contribute to sustainable development, with comments by Andrea Bjorklund, and Moshe Hirsch looked at the interaction between investment agreements and human rights treaties from a sociological perspective. Andreas Ziegler’s comments rounded up the symposium.

In our regular posts, Julian wondered when the Dutch government would file an ITLOS action after Russia charged Greenpeace activists with piracy. Kevin asked whether the ICC had learned anything from Melinda Taylor’s detention in Libya and whether The Guardian‘s legal affairs correspondent had read Perisic. He also continued last week’s inter-blog discussion with Ryan Goodman. The inter-blog discussion with JustSecurity continued with Kevin’s four thoughts on Harold Koh’s defense of unilateral humanitarian intervention.

Ken followed up on a post by Roger last week on jurisprudence post-Kiobel, by discussing his recent essay on the resurgence of the traditional bases of jurisdiction in the Alien Tort Statute. A guest post by John Dehn also revisited an earlier post, discussing an article by Sarah Cleveland and Bill Dodge on the Offenses Clause.

Finally, Jessica provided her weekly news wrap and listed events and announcements, while Julian posted a special announcement on the 2013 International Law Weekend.

Many thanks to our guest contributors and have a nice weekend!