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10 - Evidence-Guided Reform: Surveying the Empirical Research on Arbitrator Bias and Diversity in Investor–State Arbitration

from Part II - Current Challenges in International Investment Dispute Settlement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2021

By
Daniel Behn ,
Malcolm Langford ,
Laura Létourneau-Tremblay  and
Runar Hilleren Lie
Edited by
Manfred Elsig ,
Rodrigo Polanco  and
Peter van den Bossche
Manfred Elsig
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
Rodrigo Polanco
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
Peter van den Bossche
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
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Summary

As a diffuse, sprawling, relatively opaque and increasingly polarized legal order, the international investment regime, with its thousands of largely bilateral investment treaties, ad hoc system of adjudication – called investor–state arbitration or investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) – and a decades-long legitimacy crisis and backlash against its practice make it a challenging phenomenon to accurately describe and assess. It also makes the identification and prioritization of its most problematic and reform-worthy areas of concern difficult to pin down. Without empirical data, the international investment regime has been, and to some degree continues to be, very susceptible to heuristics based on limited information, anecdote, and surface-level policy prescription.

Type
Chapter
Information
International Economic Dispute Settlement
Demise or Transformation?
 , pp. 264 - 294
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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