The law applicable to arbitration is not the law applicable in arbitration. The latter determines arbitrators' decisions. The former refers to the source of their authority: the legal order that governs arbitration. According to the territorialist thesis, an arbitration can have no foundation other than that of the legal order of the particular State in which the arbitration takes place. This outdated conception is disproved by the simple factual observation that a plurality of legal orders may give effect to arbitration. Some French scholars promote the notion of an autonomous arbitral order. Inasmuch as they ultimately seek to establish this order by positing its recognition by the very State orders from which they claim autonomy, their idea is circular and in effect no more than a dressed-up variant of ordinary horizontal pluralism. But the model of horizontal pluralism fails to account for important orderings of arbitral activity. Arbitration in modern society is accurately perceived as a complex, three-dimensional form of pluralism, in which legal orders (i) are not exclusively those of States and (ii) frequently overlap.

The protection of foreign investment by way of treaties and arbitration has recently suffered attacks on its legitimacy. The article turns on human rights concerns in this context and analyses what legal mechanisms and arguments can be employed to ease the tension between investment protection and human rights. Harmonization in this regard finds two key entry points: first, at the inter-State level of investment agreements, and secondly, at the intra-State level of the foreign investment contract. At the first level, human rights considerations, particularly concerning economic and social rights, can be brought to bear by way of their systematic integration qua treaty interpretation. The article subjects this inroad to close scrutiny but concludes that, while it possesses considerable merits and has attracted a certain attention (albeit still more in the academic world than in that of arbitration practice), it remains an approach ex post, possibly leaving excessive discretion to arbitrators. Thus, at the second level, already at the pre-investment stage, efforts should be made to recast investors' “legitimate expectations” under foreign investment contracts by including a “human rights audit” as part of the due diligence to be conducted by the investor and the host State, to survey the host State's human rights treaty commitments and domestic methods for implementing these commitments. The primary objective of this audit would thus be to fully include the prospective host State's international obligations as part of the body of applicable law and thus create a better map of the landscape of an investor's “legitimate expectations”.

The principle of non-discrimination constitutes a corner-stone in different fields of international economic law, notably international trade in goods and services as well as intellectual property and investment protection. While its basic rationale appears to be straightforward, the application of the different legal elements which constitute a non-discrimination obligation has proven to be most challenging. Adjudicating bodies have been applying different interpretations and standards with regard to the legal elements of ‘less favourable treatment’, ‘likeness’ and ‘regulatory purpose’, which leads to a high fragmentation of the non-discrimination principle in international economic law. This article maps out the different theories for each of these elements on the examples of WTO law, NAFTA, bilateral investment treaties (BIT) and EU law and analyses how these theories affect the scope and liberalizing effect of the non-discrimination obligation. The article then attempts to develop a coherent factor-based application of non-discrimination rules suitable for all fields of international economic law. The article submits the theory that the elements of non-discrimination should not be applied as strict legal conditions which must be proven by a complainant, but as a range of factors which are weighed and balanced by the adjudicating bodies.

This is a survey study of 43 judges from the British House of Lords, the Caribbean Court of Justice, the High Court of Australia, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and the Supreme Courts of Ireland, India, Israel, Canada, New Zealand and the United States on the use of foreign law in constitutional rights cases. We find that the conception of apex judges citing foreign law as a source of persuasive authority (associated with Anne-Marie Slaughter, Vicki Jackson and Chris McCrudden) is of limited application. Citational opportunism and the aspiration to membership of an emerging international ‘guild’ appear to be equally important strands in judicial attitudes towards foreign law. We argue that their presence is at odds with Ronald Dworkin's theory of legal objectivity, and is revealed in a manner meeting his own methodological standard for attitudinal research.

Wordsworth's words, written about the French Revolution, will, I hope, still ring true: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.

– Justice Stephen Breyer's assessment of ‘the global legal enterprise now upon us’ before the American Society of International Law (2003)

The voluntary assignment of contractual (and non-contractual) obligations in conflict of laws is governed by article 14 of the Rome I Regulation. Under this, the validity of the assignment as between the assignor and assignee is governed by the law applicable to the contract between them (paragraph 1 of article 14). On the other hand, the assignability of the claim and the relationship between the debtor and the assignee are governed by the law applicable to the obligation assigned (paragraph 2 of article 14). Certain issues are, however, outside the scope of article 14 as it stands at present. These are the question of priorities between competing assignments (if the same obligation is assigned twice to different assignees) and the rights of third parties (mainly creditors of the assignor). This article examines the precise scope of the two existing paragraphs and considers the arguments that might be relevant in deciding what law should govern the issues at present not covered by either paragraph, a question that has become more pressing in view of the fact that negotiations will soon begin on a possible amendment of article 14 to deal with it.

The aim of this article is to look at the phenomenon of Europeanization of judiciaries of third countries through the prism of EU external policy. It is argued that external factors (objectives of EU external policies, EU soft law, EU technical and financial assistance, favourable interpretation of EU law by the ECJ towards third country nationals) play important role in persuading third country judiciaries to apply the EU acquis in their judgments. The similar pattern can be envisaged with regard to Russia and Ukraine. Case study shows that EU policies towards these countries led to generally favourable attitude towards applying the EU acquis by Russian and Ukrainian courts, though mainly as a persuasive source of law. However, problems linked to effectiveness, independence and fight with corruption hinder further Europeanization of judiciaries in Russia and Ukraine.

This article provides a critical evaluation of the main provisions of the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Secured Transactions. It examines the Guide in the context of other international and national secured transactions instruments including article 9 of the United States Uniform Commercial Code. The clear objective of the Guide is to facilitate secured financing. It is very facilitating and enabling, and permits the creation of security in all sorts of situations. Security is seen as a good thing, through enhancing the availability of lower-cost credit. The paper suggests that this closeness in approach to article 9 is likely to militate against the prospects of the Guide gaining widespread international acceptance. This is the case for various interlocking reasons including the battering that American legal and financial norms have taken with the global financial crisis.

This article looks at the recent phenomena of internationalisation and constitutional borrowing in drafting Bills of Rights. Using South Africa, Canada and Northern Ireland as its focus, this article posits key lessons to be considered in any society hoping to use these two strategies to best effect in designing indigenous Bills of Rights. This contribution makes the case that while these are viable strategies in equality and other rights provision drafting, before embarking on such trajectories, the local context must be considered. In short, effective and sensitive interaction between the ‘local and the global’ can result in a more rewarding project when those involved in formulating an indigenous Bill of Rights simultaneously reflect best international practice. The article is supported in its conclusions by a series of semi-structured interviews with key players involved in the drafting process in Northern Ireland and Canada.

This article challenges the rhetoric of hardening, according to which international standards become binding through WTO endorsement. The analysis of the system of presumptions set up in the Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement and Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Agreement reveals that international standards are actually used as a ‘ceiling’ rather than a ‘floor’ benchmark of protection, contrary to their original spirit. They represent a codified and agreed yardstick for least trade-restrictive measures, a minimum compromise between the regulatory regime and the trade litigation machinery. It follows that their nature—at least within the WTO system—is irreversibly distorted; they are treated as facts rather than as safety or quality devices.

This article considers the functions of transparency in regulating consumer contract terms in the UK and Australia. The discussion is set in the context of EU level regulation with various references to civil law approaches. The main issue explored here is the extent to which transparency is capable of legitimizing substantively unfair terms. However, I also explore other roles that may be played by transparency and the extent to which these are facilitated in the UK and Australia.

This paper examines the current European private antitrust enforcement policy. The European Commission's White Paper of 2008, the unofficial Draft Directive of 2009 and the collective redress consultation of 2011 consider a facilitated access to private actions for all types of antitrust violations under articles 101 and 102 TFEU in order to effectively compensate the victims of anticompetitive conduct. Assuming that changes are necessary, the paper argues that it might be worthwhile to limit this policy to damages claims against hardcore violations such as cartels. This suggestion is based on two main arguments. Firstly, the current European private antitrust policy probably underestimates the risks of more damages actions against all types of infringements neglecting insights from the economic analysis of law. Secondly, a revised approach is not only in line with the thinking that underpins the reform but also addresses an actual need as revealed by a comparison of litigation data from different jurisdictions. Refining the European private antitrust policy, it is argued that a focus on hard-core anticompetitive constraints such as price fixing would mitigate the potential for a strategic use of antitrust litigation and reduce the likelihood that the reform of European antitrust damages actions will lead to negative outcomes.

Academics, practitioners and international and national courts are increasingly seeking to identify and interpret international law by engaging in comparative analyses of various domestic court decisions. This emerging phenomenon, which I term ‘comparative international law’, loosely fuses international law (as a matter of substance) with comparative law (as a matter of process). However, this comparative process is seriously complicated by the ambiguous role that national court decisions play in the international law doctrine of sources, under which they provide evidence of the practice of the forum State as well as being a subsidiary means for determining international law. This article analyses these dual, and sometimes conflicting, roles of national courts and the impact of this duality on the comparative international law process.

In the light of the Supreme Court decision in OFT v Abbey National on unarranged overdraft fees in current account contracts, this article analyses the price term exemption at the heart of Directive 93/13 in its European context, and on a comparative basis. It argues for an interpretation in line with the ‘market for lemons’ rationale, which best fits the regulatory outline of Directive 93/13, and the European Court of Justice's case law. Under this approach, only those contract terms that are subject to the correcting forces of markets and competition are part of the ‘main subject matter of the contract’ and should be exempt from assessment of fairness under Directive 93/13.

The appropriate role of the courts in controlling the discretion of merger authorities has become one of the key issues in European merger law and policy in recent years. This article investigates judicial review of merger decisions, taking a comparative approach by examining cases from the EU, UK and Germany. We observe an apparent increase in the willingness of the EU and UK courts to scrutinize merger decisions, and a long-standing tradition of close scrutiny in Germany. In respect of the EU and UK, we consider agency theory offers a convincing explanation—that increased scrutiny is explained by the need to enhance the credibility of merger policy. In Germany, the constitutional basis of judicial review differs significantly, and the relatively close scrutiny exercised by the court is better explained by the very different constitutional context.

This article compares the ways in which Australian and South African courts have approached issues of classification and renvoi where a defendant argues that the action is time-barred. There are two differences in approach. First, Australian courts classify all statutes of limitation as substantive, whereas South African courts distinguish between right-extinguishing statutes (substantive) and merely remedy-barring statutes (procedural). Second, the High Court of Australia has used renvoi in the context of the limitation of actions whereas South African courts have yet to decide on whether to use renvoi. This article assesses the impact of those differences in various situations.

International fisheries law is no longer driven by the clash of interests between coastal and distant-water fishing States, but is increasingly about how States in existing international fisheries, mostly with some degree of responsibility for their depletion, are striving to exclude newcomers. The residual freedom of fishing on the high seas is an obstacle to regulation by international commissions since States outside are not bound by treaties to which they are not party—which in turn creates a disincentive for States inside to accept the necessary restraints. Rules to limit entry to international fisheries are therefore now needed, and articles 8 and 17 of the UN Fish Stocks Agreement come close to this, but their transformation into custom (or that of regulations adopted by fisheries commissions into objective regimes) so as to bind non-parties is being stunted by commissions' self-serving views on what cooperation with them by new entrants to the fisheries entails for the latter. The result is that the modern arguments for exclusion of newcomers bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the discredited 1950s abstention doctrine. This article suggests why those arguments are now meeting little resistance, despite being advanced by States collectively unwilling even to restore depleted stocks to the biomass corresponding to their maximum sustainable yield, as the doctrine would have required (and the current law also does).

In recent years, the European Union (‘eu’) has taken a number of initiatives with a view to co-ordinating consular assistance in third countries. Not only have EU citizens an entitlement to consular assistance by any EU Member State in the absence of a representation of their own, but EU Member States themselves are encouraged to co-operate by means of the Lead State Concept and other forms of co-operation. While this may seem relatively unproblematic from the perspective of the EU, it is very difficult to reconcile with general international law. The various EU agreements in this area have no application to third States: some do not have legally binding form and even those that do only apply to the parties to the treaties, ie EU Member States. This article will present the situation, analyse its complexities and offer some reflections on the global application and desirability of the regime created by the EU.

This article considers whether the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement for the Sudan (the CPA) gives rise to binding obligations for the parties under international law. The legitimacy and effectiveness of the CPA, and the avoidance of a return to bloody civil war, depends significantly on the Agreement giving rise to legal obligations. While it has been held in arbitration that the CPA is not a treaty, this article suggests that it is a binding international agreement and further that there are obligations concerning the outstanding referendum for the people of the Abyei region. The legal issues of the CPA are more complex than they at first appear and they engage deeper and broader questions of the role of international law. The article will suggest among other things that the Sudan situation demonstrates it is difficult to draw immutable general rules in abstraction about the international law relating to peace agreements and to self-determination.

‘Sometimes the most important historical events are the non-events: the things that did not occur,’ says the British historian Niall Ferguson.1 Such a statement may well describe in large measure the International Court of Justice's case-law regarding the methods for the identification of rules of customary international law during the period 2000–2009. The previous two decades had been marked by two milestones in this domain: the eighties by the judgment on the merits in Nicaragua,2 and the nineties by the Court's advisory opinion in Nuclear Weapons.3 There was, though, no single decision by the Court of comparative significance regarding methods of customary international law during the first decade of the new millennium. Further, some of the most important determinations in this domain were those in which the Court did not declare the existence of a customary international rule. However, this is not to say that the above-mentioned conclusion applies to all of the Court's jurisprudence related to customary international law. The conclusion is limited to the Court's decisions regarding the methods for the recognition of norms of this character. In fact, the Court made very important pronouncements as to the content of customary international law in many domains, such as the use of force, territorial occupation, diplomatic protection, and international humanitarian law.

The continuous transfer of authority from the national sphere to inter-governmental organizations gives rise to an increasing risk that States may be mandated by their obligations under these organizations to take measures that are inconsistent with their obligations under International Human Rights Law. Drawing on the approaches of various international, regional and national jurisdictions, this article explores two possible models for restructuring International Law that could ensure that human rights obligations remain effective. The ‘international constitutional’ approach would ensure that human rights are enshrined within the ‘constitutional’ instruments of IGOs, preventing incompatible rules from emerging. The ‘parochial’ approach would ensure that human rights as protected at the national or regional level would take precedence over conflicting international obligations.