Stockholm Center for International Law and Justice invites you to a seminar with
Dr. Stephan Schill
on the topic
International Investment Law and Community Interests: Towards a Public Interest-Based Rationale for Protecting Foreign Investors under International Investment Agreements
Critics consider international investment law (IIL) and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) as a threat to global public interests, such as environmental protection, labor standards, public health or human rights, and portray them as one-sidedly protecting foreign investors and undermining public policies that are adopted for the benefit of local populations and the international community as a whole. They also dismiss economic justifications of the system as unfounded. The present article suggests a different approach to the justification of IIL, arguing that, properly construed, IIL can be justified as a system that, on aggregate, promotes global public interests. First, the article shows how IIL and ISDS form part of the legal infrastructure that is necessary for the functioning of the global economy under a rule of law framework. Aimed at supporting global economic growth and welfare, this helps further economic, but also noneconomic global public interests, such as sustainable development. Second, the article argues that IIL and ISDS do not turn a blind eye to the conflicts that can arise between economic and noneconomic public interests. Instead, IIL and ISDS have numerous, although admittedly imperfect and as of yet insufficiently utilized, mechanisms at their disposal for alleviating ensuing tensions, thus allowing both economic and noneconomic global public interests to be advanced.
Stephan W. Schill is Professor of International and Economic Law and Governance at the University of Amsterdam, where he heads the European Research Council-funded research project ‘Transnational Public-Private Arbitration as Global Regulatory Governance’. He is admitted to the bar in Germany and New York, is a Member of the ICSID List of Conciliators, and acts as arbitrator in investor-state arbitrations. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of World Investment and Trade and has published widely on international investment law and investor-state dispute settlement, including The Multilateralization of International Investment Law (CUP 2009), International Investment Law and Comparative Public Law (OUP 2010), Practising Virtue: Inside International Arbitration (OUP 2015 – with David Caron, Abby Cohen Smutny and Epaminontas Triantafilou), Transnational Law of Public Contracts (Bruylant 2016 – with Mathias Audit) and International Investment Law and the Global Financial Architecture (Elgar Publishing 2017 – with Christian Tams and Rainer Hofmann).
Registration (voluntary) and requests for Professor Schill’s and Vladislav Janic’s article on the topic of the seminar: scilj@juridicum.su.se, by 4th of June 2018