Wolfgang Alschner - Böcker

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.

This edited collection combines state-of-the-art legal data analytics with in-depth doctrinal analysis to study the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC), Canada’s top court. A data analytics perspective adds new dimensions to the study of courts and their case law. It renders legal analysis scalable, making it possible to investigate thousands of judicial decisions, adding new breadth and depth. It also enables researchers to combine doctrinal questions about how the law evolves with institutional questions about how courts operate, shedding new light on how law works in practice. By applying a range of methods to study the content of SCC decisions, this work bridges the gap between qualitative and quantitative research. Demonstrating how new analytical perspectives can generate new insights about the Supreme Court, an institution which is closely studied by scholars both within and outside Canada, the book will be essential reading for legal scholars and political scientists, particularly those working in public law and in empirical legal studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.