States' efforts to reform the international investment regime have triggered an arbitral backlash. In response to shortcomings of earlier investment agreements, states concluded a new generation of investment treaties that actively balances investment protection obligations with host country policy space. These new-generation agreements are more comprehensive, more precise, and include novel features such as general public policy exceptions. This book reviews the first set of awards rendered under those agreements and finds that new treaties have produced old interpretive outcomes in investment arbitration, and undermine state-driven investment reforms. Adopting a systemic, evidence-based, and interdisciplinary perspective, the book leverages new data that comprehensively reflects regime dynamics, employs state-of-the-art technology including legal data science to treat the text of more than 3000 investment agreements as data, and draws from a range of theoretical frameworks spanning from law and economics to complexity science. The result is a new and authoritative empirical account of the evolution and current state of the international investment regime.

About the Author
Wolfgang Alschner is an empirical legal scholar specialized in International Economic Law and Legal Data Science. He holds a PhD in International Law from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, and a Master of Laws from Stanford Law School. Since 2017 he has been a Faculty Member of the Common Law Section of the University of Ottawa, Canada, with cross-appointment to the Faculty of Computer Science. He teaches International Economic Law, Legal Research Methodology and Data Science for Lawyers in French and English and runs the uOttawa LegalTech Lab.

Reviews
Investment Arbitration and State-Driven Reform...under review provide fruitful, and complementary, insights as we collectively consider the path ahead. * Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, The American Journal of International Law *
This book is not only important - it is avant garde in many ways. From the computational analysis approach to the analysis of treaties - their innovation and the outcomes of the awards interpreting them, the interdisciplinary approach harnessed, and the three distinct avenues for efficient reform to produce the expected new outcomes to the modernized treaties-it may be said that the puzzle itself might have been too ambitious. * Canadian Yearbook of International Law *



Book Information
ISBN 9780197644386
Author Wolfgang Alschner
Format Hardback
Page Count 352
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 163mm * 238mm * 29mm