Schultz & Dupont: Investment Arbitration: Promoting the Rule of Law or Over-Empowering Investors? A Quantitative Empirical Study

Thomas Schultz (King's College London – Law) & Cedric G. Dupont (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies) have posted Investment Arbitration: Promoting the Rule of Law or Over-Empowering Investors? A Quantitative Empirical Study (European Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

The increased used of investment arbitration raises questions about the functions it effectively exerts. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by examining the empirical manifestations of three simple functions that investment arbitration allegedly fulfills. The first hypothesis is that investment arbitration acts as a tool to empower investors from developed states over governments of developing host states. The second is that investment arbitration is a replacement for dysfunctional domestic courts in countries with a weak rule of law tradition. The third is that investment arbitration serves to promote international investment law. Our empirical investigation uses an original data set that compiles over 500 investment arbitration claims from 1972 to 2010.