CLS Seminar: Investment Law and Arbitration as a Window into the Role of Contact in Global Economic Law and Governance

This event has ended.

Keynote speaker: Professor Edward S Cohen Professor of Political Science, Westminster College

Law Building, Room 1.28

Over the past two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines and traditions have been exploring the ways in which contract – as a norm, discourse, and set of institutions – has come to play a central role in the governance of global political economic relationships.

In this presentation, Edward S Cohen employs an approach to contract rooted in the traditions of American legal realism to shed light on the rapidly expanding field of international investment law and investor-state arbitration. He will argue that the relationships between states and corporate investors has been increasingly shaped by a hybrid legal regime in which norms and practices of private contract law have been deeply insinuated into the law that governs the appropriate scope and objects of public power. The result is a regime of international law disproportionally
responsive to the purposes and power of private agents. Edward S Cohen concludes by considering the potential and limits of emerging attempts to reform this regime.

For further information please contact Sara Dezalay at dezalays@cardiff.ac.uk