States' efforts to reform the international investment regime have triggered an arbitral backlash. In response to shortcomings of earlier investment agreements, states concluded a new generation of investment treaties that actively balances investment protection obligations with host country policy space. These new-generation agreements are more comprehensive, more precise, and include novel features such as general public policy exceptions. This book reviews the first set of awards rendered under those agreements and finds that new treaties have produced old interpretive outcomes in investment arbitration, and undermine state-driven investment reforms.

Adopting a systemic, evidence-based, and interdisciplinary perspective, the book leverages new data that comprehensively reflects regime dynamics, employs state-of-the-art technology including legal data science to treat the text of more than 3000 investment agreements as data, and draws from a range of theoretical frameworks spanning from law and economics to complexity science. The result is a new and authoritative empirical account of the evolution and current state of the international investment regime.

Wolfgang Alschner's profile page

Wolfgang Alschner is an empirical legal scholar specialized in International Economic Law and Legal Data Science. He holds a PhD in International Law from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, and a Master of Laws from Stanford Law School. Since 2017 he has been a Faculty Member of the Common Law Section of the University of Ottawa, Canada, with cross-appointment to the Faculty of Computer Science. He teaches International Economic Law, Legal Research Methodology and Data Science for Lawyers in French and English and runs the uOttawa LegalTech Lab.