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Over the past forty-five years, bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have become the most important international legal mechanism for the encouragement and governance of foreign direct investment. The proliferation of BITs during the past two decades in particular has been phenomenal. These intergovernmental treaties typically grant extensive rights to foreign investors, including protection of contractual rights and the right to international arbitration in the event of an investment dispute. How can we explain the widespread adoption of BITs? We argue that the spread of BITs is driven by international competition among potential host countries-typically developing countries-for foreign direct investment. We propose a set of hypotheses that derive from such an explanation and develop a set of empirical tests that rely on network measures of economic competition as well as more indirect evidence of competitive pressures on the host to sign BITs. The evidence suggests that potential hosts are more likely to sign BITs when their competitors have done so. We find some evidence that coercion and learning play a role, but less support for cultural explanations based on emulation. Our main finding is that the diffusion of BITs is associated with competitive economic pressures among developing countries to capture a share of foreign investment. We are agnostic at this point about the benefits of this competition for development.

\"Much of antitrust law scholarship has focused on substantive legal issues--theories of harm and changing law and policy. Surprisingly, there has been very little work that is comparative, on a fundamental element that is a critical building block to effective policy--procedural fairness. Procedural fairness encompasses issues of transparency and due process. Procedural fairness has been an important issue in global antitrust for some time. The types of due process concerns raised globally often relate to the lack of effective representation, the use of industrial policy by third parties, and procedural tools that do not allow for the most effective advocacy to lead to efficient outcomes. This book focuses on these issues and teases out common problems and distinct issues in particular jurisdictions. This allows for a rethink of creating a more effective system for procedural fairness, an exploration of these issues in each jurisdiction, along with highlights of particular cases in which due process issues have emerged\"--Dust jacket.

This Article examines international law from the perspective of compliance. It puts forward a theory of international law in which compliance comes about in a model of rational, self-interested states. International law can affect state behavior because states are concerned about the reputational and direct sanctions that follow its violation. The model allows us to consider international law in a new light. Most strikingly, one is forced to reconsider two of the most fundamental doctrinal points in the field-the definitions of customary international law (\"CIL\") and of international law itself. A reputational model of compliance makes it clear that CIL affects the behavior of a state because other states believe that the first state has a commitment that it must honor. A failure to honor that commitment hurts a state's reputation because it signals that it is prepared to breach its obligations. This implies a definition that turns on the existence of an obligation in the eyes of other states rather than the conventional requirements of state practice and a sense of legal obligation felt by the breaching state. Classical definitions of international law look to two primary sources of law-treaties and CIL. A reputational theory, however, would label as international law any promise that materially alters state incentives. This includes agreements that fall short of the traditional definition, including what is often referred to as \"soft law.\" The Article points out that there is no way to categorize treaties and CIL as \"law\" without also including soft law. Agreements such as ministerial accords or memoranda of understanding represent commitments by a state which, if breached, will have a reputational impact. For this reason, these soft-law agreements should be included in the definition of international law. The Article also calls for a refocusing of international-law scholarship. Because international law works through reputational and direct sanctions, we must recognize that these sanctions have limited force. As a result, international law is more likely to have an impact on events when the stakes are relatively modest. The implication is that many of the topics that receive the most attention in international law-the laws of war, territorial limits, arms agreements, and so on-are unlikely to be affected by international law. On the other hand, issues such as international economic matters, environmental issues, and so on, can more easily be affected by international law. This suggests that the international-law academy should focus greater attention on the latter subjects and less on the former.

Human rights advocates and international lawyers view international agreements and other international norms as important tools to improve human rights around the world. This Article explains that, contrary to widely held beliefs, international human rights norms are not a one-way street. Norms capable of generating improved behavior in poorly performing states sometimes also exert a downward pull on high-performing states. This downward pull leads to what we term \"human rights backsliding\"—a tendency for high-performing states to weaken their domestic human rights regimes relative to prior behavior or relative to what they would otherwise have done. The theory of backsliding is a novel one, so we introduce it with several real-world examples. In order to describe the theory, its assumptions, and its consequences as explicitly as possible, we also provide a formal model of backsliding. We then explain how an understanding of human rights backsliding helps explain state behavior that is otherwise puzzling. Finally, we explore some of the implications of backsliding for the design of international agreements, and we consider strategies for advocates seeking to advance human rights internationally.

This paper examines the relationship between the wealth and power of states and their ability to participate fully within the World Trade Organization's system of dispute resolution. Two alternative hypotheses are considered. The power hypothesis predicts that politically weak countries will refrain from filing complaints against politically powerful states for fear of costly retaliation. The capacity hypothesis predicts that low‐income states will tend to complain about behavior by high‐income states because the latter offer a higher expected return. We test these two hypotheses and find considerable support for the capacity hypothesis and no support for the power hypothesis. We conclude that poor states behave differently than their rich counterparts because they lack the financial, human, and institutional capital to participate fully in the dispute resolution system.

We live in a world of sovereign states that lacks a supra-national government. One consequence of this reality is that states must find ways to manage their interactions without reliance on some higher coercive power. When considering a problem that affects two or more states, one solution is for the states to cooperate by entering into an agreement in which each party makes representations about how it will act. If successful, agreements of this sort make behavior more predictable and encourage value-increasing cooperative behavior.

In September 2007, Chicago area toy company RC2 Corporation announced a recall of Thomas the Tank Engine wooden railway toys manufactured in China. The recall, prompted by the presence of lead paint in the toys' finish, was the second by the company within a three-month period. In all, the company recalled 1.8 million units of the extremely popular toy. These were not the only toys recalled. That year, almost forty million Chinese-made toys or other items used by children were recalled-about one for every household with children.

In well-functioning domestic legal systems, courts provide a mechanism through which commitments and obligations are enforced. A party that fails to honor its obligations can be brought before a court and sanctioned through seizure of person or property. The international arena also has courts or, to expand the category somewhat, tribunals. These institutions, however, lack the enforcement powers of domestic courts. How, then, do they work, and how might they work better or worse? The first objective of this Article is to establish that the role of the tribunal is to promote compliance with some underlying substantive legal rule. This simple yet often-overlooked point provides a metric by which to measure the effectiveness of tribunals. But a tribunal does not operate in isolation. The use of a tribunal is one way to resolve a dispute, but reliance on diplomacy and other traditional tools of international relations is another. Furthermore, even if a case is filed with a tribunal, there may be settlement prior to a ruling and, even if there is a ruling, the losing party may refuse to comply. Understanding international tribunals, therefore, requires consideration of the entire range of possible outcomes to a dispute, including those that do not involve formal litigation. The second goal of this Article is to develop a rational-choice model of dispute resolution and tribunals that takes this reality into account. The third goal is to explore, based on the above model, various features of international tribunals and identify those that increase effectiveness and those that reduce it. Finally, the Article applies the analysis to help us understand two prominent tribunals: the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body and the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

The World Trade Organization (\"WTO\") has little to say about labor practices and workers' rights. It has no committee or working group on trade and labor, no agreement addressing labor standards, and the only directly relevant provision in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (\"GATT\") is an Article XX exception to trade obligations for measures relating to the products of prison labor. The WTO is so determined to keep labor issues at a distance that it explicitly stated in its 1996 Singapore Ministerial Declaration that \"[t]he International Labour Organization (ILO) is the competent body to set and deal with these [core labor] standards.\" Despite the WTO's resistance, however, the relationship between trade and labor remains a topic of heated discussion, appearing in regional trading agreements, domestic debates about trade, political protests, and academic discourse.