Symposium: Investor-State Arbitration: Perspectives on Legitimacy and Practice

The Suffolk University Law School will host a symposium on "Investor-State Arbitration: Perspectives on Legitimacy and Practice," October 31, 2008, in Boston. The program is here. Why attend?

Increasing international investment has encouraged the rapid development of a new field of international law to define the obligations between host States and foreign investors and to create procedures to resolve related investment disputes. In recent years, there has been widespread recourse to arbitration between investors and host States as a means of resolving these disputes. These investor-State disputes often involve significant amounts of capital and raise challenging legal issues, while implicating shifting objectives at the juncture of public and private national and international law. Even while the network of investment agreements continues to expand and the number of investor-State arbitrations increases, there has been an emerging call to take stock and re-evaluate the current system, with several countries moving to denounce their obligations to participate in investor-State arbitration for some or all categories of disputes. This symposium will examine the investor-State arbitration system – with the challenge to panelists to discuss its strengths and weaknesses, both in terms of systemic and practice-related issues, and to identify where potential improvements may be made or areas that need further study.