In the past twenty years the world of investment arbitration has taken the commercial world by storm. There are over 2,750 bilateral investment treaties and almost every one of them has an arbitration provision. Investment arbitration is now a prominent feature of the arbitration landscape. Just as BITs have proliferated in recent years, so too have free...
[Opinio Juris is delighted to post these remarks by Professors Evan Fox-Decent (McGill) and Evan Criddle (Syracuse) on the fallout from the allegations that their article was plagiarized by a member of the Philippines Supreme Court] We are writing to lend support to the University of Philippine’s College of Law, which now faces a very serious charge of contempt from the...
Back in July, I noted this story out of the Philippines, which alleged that a justice of the Philippines Supreme Court had plagiarized (and distorted) an article by Evan Criddle and Evan Fox-Descent in the Yale Journal of International Law (and featured here at Opinio Juris). (see the comment under the original post for a comment by Professor Criddle). Well, things...
If passed, the House bill, "Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act" (H.R. 2378) has all the markings of a major trade battle before the WTO. At bottom, the law requires the United States administrative agencies to treat currency manipulation as a subsidy that would be subject to countervailing duties equal to the benefit to exporters conferred by the manipulation. The...
Brad Roth has sent along a link to this New York Times editorial, which begins: If a country sinks beneath the sea, is it still a country? That is a question about which the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls — is now seeking expert legal advice. It is also a question the...
It's not often that you run into a story that combines international arbitration, Kremlin politics, post-Soviet autocrats, utopian urban projects, transnational networks, electoral politics, and chess. So, read on...
Actually, I'm not, although I'm confident Labor will pull out the election. But I'm endlessly fascinated by the fact that people place bets on the outcome of the election -- and that the latest odds are treated as serious news by The Age, the best newspaper in Australia: Labor has been the subject of a huge betting plunge on it winning...
That’s a remarkable statement, but it actually is true. Yesterday the Supreme Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project addressed the question of whether a federal statute criminalizing the provision of “material support” to terrorist organizations was constitutional. A humanitarian NGO group wanted to train members of two terrorist organizations, the PKK and the LTTE, to become more...
The news coming out of China of ten suicide deaths at Foxconn industrial park is terribly distressing. All of the workers who committed suicide were recent high school or vocational training school graduates aged between 18 to 24. One of the fatalities, Sun Danyong, jumped to his death after being interrogated over a missing iPhone prototype. Foxconn,...
There's a post that's been making the rounds in the science fiction blogosphere that warrants note by those interested in international law, especially in regards to issues of international trade, development, and regulation. The piece is by Ghanaian writer Jonathan Dotse and it concerns the rise of African cyberpunk. Before getting to Dotse's post, though, a couple of words on cyberpunk itself. Cyberpunk is...
The Eleventh Circuit in United States v. Frank has ruled that a child sex trafficking statute applies extraterritorially. The statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2251A, provides that: “[w]hoever purchases ...
Today's Financial Times has a story on how unhappy U.S. businesses have become about Chinese government restrictions interfering with their access to Chinese markets. So, one can understand how U.S. exporters would welcome news that the United States and China are getting closer to including a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT). And, let's be clear, this would be the mother-of-all BITs, given...
