Alternative Visions of the International Law on Foreign Investment

These essays pay tribute to Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah's illustrious career and explore alternative visions of international investment law and arbitration.

These essays pay tribute to Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah, Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. The book surveys issues and themes connected with scholarly resistance to a neo-liberal perspective. It offers an account of the current backlash against investment treaties and investment arbitration in various countries.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.