BOOK: Nicolas PERRONE, Investment Treaties and the Legal Imagination (Oxford: OUP, 2021). ISBN 9780198862147, 80.00 GBP

 

(Source: OUP)

Oxford University Press has published a new book on the history of international investment law.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Foreign investors have a privileged position under investment treaties. They enjoy strong rights, have no obligations, and can rely on a highly efficient enforcement mechanism: investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Unsurprisingly, this extraordinary status has made international investment law one of the most controversial areas of the global economic order.

This book sheds new light on the topic, by showing that foreign investor rights are not the result of unpredicted arbitral interpretations, but rather the outcome of a world-making project realized by a coalition of business leaders, bankers, and their lawyers in the 1950s and 1960s. Some initiatives that these figures planned for did not emerge, such as a multilateral investment convention, but they were successful in developing a legal imagination that gradually occupied the space of international investment law. They sought not only to set up a dispute settlement mechanism but also to create a platform to ground their vision of foreign investment relations. Tracing their normative project from the post-World War II period, this book shows that the legal imagination of these business leaders, bankers, and lawyers is remarkably similar to present ISDS practice. Common to both is what they protect, such as foreign investors' legitimate expectations, as well as what they silence or make invisible. Ultimate, this book argues that our canon of imagination, of adjustment and potential reform, remains closely associated with this world-making project of the 1950s and 1960s.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicolás M. Perrone, Research Associate Professor, Universidad Andres Bello, Viña del Mar, Chile

Nicolás M Perrone is a Research Associate Professor at Universidad Andrés Bello, Chile. He has previously taught at Durham University and Universidad Externado de Colombia. Nicolás has been Visiting Professor at Universidad Nacional de San Martín, the International University College of Turin, and Università del Piemonte Orientale, a faculty member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy (Harvard Law School) and a Visiting Lecturer at Xi'an Jiaotong School of Law. Nicolás has also consulted for the OECD, and worked as a legal fellow for UNCTAD.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: A Legal Imagination

1:Foreign Investor Rights and Investment Relations

2:The Norm Entrepreneurs of the 1950s and 1960s

3:Competing Imaginaries and the 1970s

4:The Rise of Investment Treaties and ISDS in the 1990s and Since

5:ISDS in Action

6:Givings and ISDS

7:Local Communities and ISDS

Conclusion: Towards a New Legal Imagination

 

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