Law Commons^™

Recapturing Public Power: Is Investment Arbitration's Engagement Of The Public Interest Contributing To The Democratic Deficit?, Barnali Choudhury

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Globalization has changed the way sovereign states regulate their societies. The effect of globalization has been the creation of several international agreements that transfer decision-making from the national to the international level. An important subset of these agreements is international investment treaties; an estimated 2,500 of these treaties have been entered into worldwide by a number of states, especially in the last ten to twelve years. As these agreements almost always contain arbitration clauses, the number and scope of arbitrations handling disputes under these investment agreements have grown exponentially. Arbitrators governing these disputes are now regularly reviewing domestic public interest …

Do Norms Still Matter? The Corrosive Effects Of Globalization On The Vitality Of Norms, Patrick J. Keenan

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Why does the process of globalization undermine the power of social norms to regulate behavior? Norms are the social regularities that shape individual behavior and help to create vibrant--or dysfunctional--communities. Most theories of norms do not account for the many ways that globalization affects the foundations of norms. This Article fills the gap by developing a more robust theory of the informal regulation of behavior that considers the ways that the process of globalization can interfere with the creation of norms and erode their power.

Drawing on behavioral economics, sociology, and criminology, the theory proposed in this Article contains three …