Law Commons^™

Empirically Evaluating Claims About Investment Treaty Arbitration, Susan Franck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

With the blossoming of empirical legal scholarship, there is an increased appreciation for the insights it offers issues of international importance. One area that can benefit from such inquiry is the resolution of disputes from investment treaties, which affects international relations, implicates international legality of domestic government conduct, and puts millions of taxpayer dollars at risk. While suggesting there has been a "litigation explosion", commentators make untested assertions about investment treaty disputes. Little empirical work transparently explores this area, however. As the first research that explains its methodology and results, this article is a modest attempt to evaluate claims about …

Integrating Investment Treaty Conflict And Dispute Systems Design, Susan Franck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

With the debate on the renewal of the Trade Promotion Authority Act, the proper terms of investment treaties - including dispute resolution provisions - have become an issue of public scrutiny. In a so-called litigation explosion, investors resolve disputes against host governments through international arbitration mechanisms in investment treaties; and there is little evidence of reliance on other processes like mediation. This escalation has lead to a teething period where parties and non-parties have expressed divergent views as to the efficacy, efficiency and fairness of the dispute resolution process. With billions of dollars and sovereignty at stake, the dispute resolution …

Using The Unidroit Principles To Fill Gaps In The Cisg, John Y. Gotanda

Working Paper Series

The United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods (CISG) sets forth only a basic framework for the recovery of damages, thereby giving a court of tribunal broad authority to determine an aggrieved party’s loss based on circumstances of the particular case. Unfortunately, the lack of specificity has resulted in much litigation, and seemingly conflicting results. To remedy this problem, some have argued that the gaps in the CISG damages provisions should be filled with the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts. In this paper, I argue that the gap-filling rules of CISG preclude the UNIDROIT Principles from being …

Prejudgment Interest In International Arbitration, Jeffrey M. Colon, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

Tribunals in international arbitration are regularly asked by claimants to award prejudgment interest. Unless foreclosed by an agreement between the parties, there is widespread agreement prejudgment interest should put the claimant in the same position as it would have been had it not been injured by the respondent. However, there is little consensus how to calculate prejudgment interest in order to accomplish that purpose. In this Essay, we describe the proper method of calculating prejudgment interest based on sound financial principles. Using the paradigm that the respondent has forced the claimant to make an involuntary loan to the respondent, we …

Is International Trade A Substitute For Migration?, Robert J. Carbaugh

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Business

If a goal of immigration reform is to lessen the flow of unauthorized immigrants into the U.S., could international trade be used to deter immigration rather than adopting legal barriers? The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on this question by considering the theoretical foundations and empirical research regarding the connection between trade and migration.

It-Apas: Harmonizing Inconsistent Transfer Pricing Rules In Income Tax - Customs - Vat, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

In most jurisdictions there are three separate spheres of transfer pricing analysis - income tax, customs and VAT. Although they share policy objectives, terminology and frequently borrowing methodologies from one another these domestic transfer pricing systems are not in harmony.

Businesses find this lack of harmony costly, problematical, but also a planning opportunity. The door is open for arbitrage.

What if the transfer pricing rules within a jurisdiction were harmonized? The World Customs Organization (WCO) and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are considering this question.

This paper synthesizes the range of transfer pricing regimes currently in use, …

The International Enclosure Movement, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Most of the recent intellectual property literature concerns the enclosure of the public domain or the one-way ratchet of intellectual property protection. While these concerns are significant and rightly placed, a different, and perhaps more important, enclosure movement is currently taking place at the international level. Instead of the public domain, this concurrent movement encloses the policy space of individual countries and requires them to adopt one-size-fits-all legal standards that ignore their local needs, national interests, technological capabilities, institutional capacities, and public health conditions. As a result of this enclosure, countries are forced to adopt inappropriate intellectual property systems, and …

Has India Addressed Its Farmers' Woes? A Story Of Plant Protection Issues, Srividhya Ragavan, Jamie Mayer O'Shields

Faculty Scholarship

The paper examines issues relating to establishing breeders rights in developing nations by taking India as an example. At the outset, the paper examines the international obligations relating to protecting plant breeder’s rights by examining the requirements under Article 27.3 of the TRIPS agreement. In doing so, the paper examines analyzes what amounts to an effective sui generis system as required under TRIPS.

Further, the paper analyzes the constituents of the models currently touted by developed nations and outlined under the Union for Plant Variety Protection (UPOV, 1991) to determine the model’s ability to fulfill the TRIPS requirement. In determining …

Reforming Key International Financial Institutions For The 21st Century: Hearing Before The Subcomm. On Security And International Trade And Finance Of The S. Comm. On Banking, Housing, And Urban Affairs, 110th Cong., Aug. 2, 2007 (Statement Of Daniel K. Tarullo, Geo. U. L. Center), Daniel K. Tarullo

Testimony Before Congress

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Interest, John Y. Gotanda

Working Paper Series

In recent years, a number of tribunals, mainly those deciding investment disputes, have re-examined traditional practices concerning the awarding of interest, particularly whether interest should be awarded at market rates and on a compounded basis. However, many tribunals deciding transnational contracts disputes continue to follow the practice of applying national laws on interest, which often results in the application of domestic statutory interest rates calling for a fixed rate of interest to accrue on a simple as opposed to compound basis. These statutory rates often do not change to reflect economic conditions and thus may under compensate or over compensate …

The Existing Legal Infrastructure Of Brics: Where Have We Been And Where Are We Going, Robert B. Ahdieh, Zhu Lee, Srividhya Ragavan, Kevin Noonan, Clinton W. Francis

Faculty Scholarship

The focus of this panel is incrementally shifting from the previous panel. Whereas the previous was looking at public/private issues and issues relating to incentivizing innovation in the subject countries, we're going to take a focus more on, I think it's safe to say, from an external perspective looking at these countries and issues that are confronted by businesses who our either planning to deal with the four subject countries or are concerned about their technologies being used in their four subject countries.

We have four panelists, and each of them is going to speak to one of the four …

Remedying Trade Remedies, Sungjoon Cho

All Faculty Scholarship

Although competition has been an ideological beacon of economic governance ever since the birth of the Union, it has largely been an internal affair. External competition from foreign producers has failed to be factored into antitrust scrutiny. On the contrary, the government, through its trade policies such as antidumping remedies, has often hampered foreign competition to protect domestic producers at the expense of all the benefits that foreign competition might bring to the economy. Antidumping remedies tend to create a legal cartel: they fix the import prices and generate non-price predation by petitioners. However, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)'s potential …

Of The World Trade Court's Burden, Sungjoon Cho

All Faculty Scholarship

Decisions of the WTO tribunal (Court) on sensitive disputes, such as those concerning human health, have often caused resentment from some groups, besides losing parties. Beneath this disapproval against the Court lies an image of a Dworkinian Hercules which capriciously renders its own answers on risks and science. In judging which party should win the case, this Hercules assesses parties' arguments and evidence on risks and regulatory responses through a technical rule labeled the “burden of proof” (BOP). Yet, the BOP is more of the Court's burden than of parties' burden (who to prove) in that the final outcome of …

Toward An Identity Theory Of International Organizations, Sungjoon Cho

All Faculty Scholarship

Conventional international relations (IR) theorists, such as realists, neo-functionalists or regime theorists, view international organizations (IOs) as passive tools with which to achieve certain goals. Although an IO may facilitate inter-state cooperation and reduce transaction costs, it does not have a life of its own. Therefore, conventional IR theorists focus mostly on the creation of an IO and inter-state cooperation leading up to the creation. As a result, an IO's institutional change remains rather an “under-studied” and “under-theorized” issue in the conventional international relations (IR) framework.

Granted, conventional IR theories may provide useful insights on an inter-national dynamic among creators …

Moot Court In Global Language Of Trade, Mark R. Shulman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Economic Impact Of International Labor Migration: Recent Estimates And Policy Implications, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, I survey the economic theory and the most recent empirical evidence of the economic impact of international labor migration. Estimates of the magnitude of the gains that the world could enjoy by liberalizing international migration indicate that even partial liberalization would not only produce substantial increases in the world’s real income but also improve its distribution. The gains from liberalization would be distributed such that if we examine the effects on natives in the countries of immigration, on the migrants, and on those left behind in the countries of emigration, we find that each group would enjoy …

International Enclosure, The Regime Complex, And Intellectual Property Schizophrenia, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

The year 2005 marked the tenth anniversary of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. Since it entered into effect on January 1, 1995, the Agreement has impacted a wide variety of areas, including agriculture, health, the environment, education, culture, competition, free speech, democracy, and the rule of law. Today, intellectual property protection has been considered a major issue in both the domestic and international policy debates, and policymakers have actively explored intellectual property issues in many different international regimes. These regimes range from public health to human rights and from biological diversity to information and communications.

As …

A Creditable Vat?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In the early 1990s, Bolivia tried to adopt a popular U.S. tax reform proposal: replacing its corporate income tax with a cash-flow -type consumption tax, broadly similar in structure to taxes proposed by a long line of theorists from Prof. William Andrews in 1974 to the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform in 2006. Unfortunately, the Bolivian experiment ran into an insuperable obstacle: the U.S. foreign tax credit (FTC) rules. The U.S. Treasury decided that the Bolivian tax would not be creditable for U.S. corporations investing in Bolivia. Given the importance of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) for Bolivia, …

Beyond Doha’S Promises: Administrative Barriers As An Obstruction To Development, Sungjoon Cho

All Faculty Scholarship

This article articulates the potentially fatal consequences of administrative barriers to the goal of developing poor countries and suggests retooling the current trade norms and policies in a developmentally-friendly manner. The article constructs the concept of administrative barriers centering on domestic regulations, i.e., antidumping measures, regulatory standards, and rules of origin, which have the most potential to obstruct development. It then highlights developmental hazards of these administrative barriers. It observes that both protectionist antidumping duties and the excruciating investigative procedures tend to offset developing countries' comparative advantages in favor of developed countries' domestic producers. It then argues that under-capacitated developing …

Doha’S Development, Sungjoon Cho

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay argues that the current development crisis within the Doha Round is inextricably linked to the nature of modern day trade negotiations. This Round reveals a bargaining process in which the powerful can too easily exploit and prevail over the powerless. This process is also vulnerable to domestic political maneuvers such as capture. Under these circumstances, poor countries' development concerns are not well represented, which accounts, despite years of talks, for the current sorry state of the negotiational outcome on agricultural subsidies and tariffs. To overcome these flaws of trade negotiation, this Essay suggests that certain core legal precepts, …

Toward A New Economic Constitution: Judicial Disciplines On Trade Politics, Sungjoon Cho

All Faculty Scholarship

This article first observes that protectionism is an icon of trade politics and thus likely to gather fresh momentum as a domestic election approaches. The paper then problematizes protectionism beyond mere seasonal election politics by revealing its fatal pathologies both to the United States and to the rest of the world. Protectionism basically caters to the special interest at the expense of the larger public interest, which may be coined as a Madisonian constitutional failure. It also deviates from global trading norms, which the United States hypocritically continues to preach adherence to for the rest of the world. This double …

Of Cabbages And Cabotage: The Case For Opening Up The U.S. Airline Industry To International Competition, Robert M. Hardaway

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article attempts to show that the economic advantages of free trade in the airline industry is no less than other industries, but also that the reasons posited for the rejection of free trade do not stand up to comprehensive analysis. Proposed herein is the adoption of "cabotage," defined by the Standard Dictionary of the English language as "air transport of passengers and goods within the same national territory. ' The definition adopted by International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) at the Chicago Convention is, "Each state shall have the right to refuse permission to the aircraft of other contracting states …

Creating "Shelf Space": Nafta's Experience With Cultural Protection, Chios Carmody

Law Publications

The relatively swift negotiation and implementation of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CCD) invites us to consider what came before it and what may follow. This article reviews experience with the creation of cultural “shelf space” under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through the use of a cultural “exception” and how this experience served as an important impetus for Canadian leadership in the negotiation and conclusion of the CCD. The article goes on to consider the CCD’s potential impact as custom and process in the creation of cultural “shelf …

Applicable Law Provisions In International Uniform Commercial Law Conventions, Paolo E. Conci

LLM Theses and Essays

The development of international trade requires predictability and uniformity of the applicable legal framework. Such requirements can be satisfied by means of international uniform commercial law conventions, which try to set forth coherent and uniform bodies of substantial rules. A key role is also played by private international law, an instrument operating at a different level but often included in the uniform conventions themselves. This paper analyzes the relationship between international uniform commercial law conventions and private international law to investigate how it has developed over the last seventy years, and suggests a new approach to international commercial transactions in …

Corporate Restrictions In Mexico And The United States, Dennis Rios

LLM Theses and Essays

Mexico and the United States have had throughout their history very different experiences in their international relations and thus different approaches towards foreign investment. Both Mexican and American corporations looking to invest in each others countries have to face several restrictions in their attempt to conduct business. These restrictions are constantly changing as the needs and circumstances in each country change. The United States throughout most of its history has had for the most part, a very open policy towards foreign investment. Mexico has been throughout most of its history, on the other side, adopting very restrictive measures towards foreign …

Competition Law And The Wto: Rethinking The Relationship, David J. Gerber

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay identifies obstacles to the inclusion of a competition law regime in the WTO and suggests changes that are likely to be necessary if competition law is to become an effective part of the WTO. Two obstacles have impeded inclusion of competition law in the WTO's legal regime and are likely to continue to do so. They are (i) a lack of confidence that the norms, practices and procedures of the WTO rest on a robust conception of community and (ii) uncertainty and concern about what form of competition law might be included and what its role in the …

Parol Evidence Under The Cisg: The "Homeward Trend" Reconsidered, 68 Ohio St. L.J. 133 (2007), Karen H. Cross

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

The CISG has been described as one of history 's most successful attempts to harmonize international commercial law. Consistent with its goal of harmonizing the law of international sales, Article 7(1) of the CISG instructs courts and arbitrators to interpret the Convention in light of "its international character and the need to promote uniformity in its application. " MCC-Marble v. Ceramica Nuova D'Agostina is a U.S. decision that has been praised for its adherence to Article 7(1). In contrast with conventional academic commentary, which praises MCC-Marble and criticizes the tendency of courts to interpret the CISG in light of their …

Dissonant Harmonization: Limitations On "Cash N' Carry" Creativity, 70 Alb. L. Rev. 1163 (2007), Doris E. Long

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Even though creativity lies at the heart of present copyright laws, the impulse to create-or more precisely what triggers such creativity-remains largely unexamined. Coinciding with the digital demand for access to information, new standards for "cash 'n' carry" creativity are being urged with little regard to what level of authorial3 control may be required to ensure continued enrichment of the public domain through the creation of vibrant new works. Scientific, psychological, and sociological studies indicate that "cash 'n' carry" creativity fails to implement the critical triggering mechanisms for the creative impulse. Moreover, such "cash 'n' carry" attitudes toward authors' rights …

Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes: The Kimberly Process And The Morality Exception To Wto Restrictions, Karen E. Woody

Scholarly Articles

This Article analyzes the events predicating the Kimberley Process and examines the validity of the Kimberley Process in relation to international trade obligations. Part I describes the background of conflict diamonds and their role in African wars. The section outlines the need for regulation in the diamond industry and examines how other attempted measures at curbing the illicit diamond trade have fallen short. Part II details the Kimberley Process and its guidelines. This section analyzes the relevant U.S. legislation passed in 2003, the Clean Diamond Trade Act. Part II also suggests that because the Kimberley Process ("KP") is predicated upon …

Empiricism And International Law: Insights For Investment Treaty Dispute Resolution, Susan Franck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

While scholars in the United States increasingly focus on the empirical dimension of legal scholarship, there have been challenges in using empiricism to explore international legal issues. Rather than relying on logic or instinct alone, empirical methodologies can provide scholars with tools to gain new facts, see existing ideas through a different lens, and engage in a more nuanced analysis of international law phenomena. There appears to be a natural synergy between empiricism and international investment treaty dispute resolution. With calls for trade time outs by U.S. presidential candidates, there is interest in how investment treaties function, whether they achieve …