International Trade Law Commons^™

Addressing Transplant Tourism Problems And Proposed Solutions: Regulation Instead Of Prohibition, Colleen Naumovich

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Medical tourism, as defined by scholar Glenn Cohen, is "the travel of residents of one country to another country for treatment."' Transplant tourism, a type of medical tourism, is traveling abroad to purchase an organ for transplant. Although organ sale is currently illegal in every country except Iran, many countries-such as India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt-have thriving black markets for these goods. Organ transplants are often the only effective means of treating end state organ failure, and the demand for transplants is especially high in developed and middle-income countries. Shortages of available donors and organs, however, have caused …

Chinese Resource-For-Infrastructure (Rfi) Investments In Sub-Saharan Africa And The Future Of The "Rules-Based" Framework For Sovereign Finance: The Sicomines Case Study, Jingwei Xu

Michigan Journal of International Law

China has emerged as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest development financier over the past two decades. While commentators have observed novel, sui generis transactional structures in China’s financing arrangements, legal analysis of those contractual forms and their relationships to incumbent international economic governance regimes remains scant. This note addresses those scholarly lacunae, taking as its case study the 2008 Sicomines Agreement—a multi-billion USD investment financing agreement between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and various Chinese corporate entities that merges infrastructure investment with a mineral extraction joint-venture project. It demonstrates that the Sicomines Agreement selectively draws on and integrates pre-existing modes of …

The Federal Coal Leasing Program As An Actionable Subsidy Under International Trade Law, Jackson Erpenbach

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is often criticized for standing in the way of responses to climate change. Restrictions on domestic renewable energy subsidies under the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement) have drawn particular disfavor. But critics overlook the role that the SCM Agreement can play in similarly disciplining domestic fossil fuel subsidies. This Note demonstrates that potential role by focusing on one prominent fossil fuel subsidy in the United States: The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) coal leasing program on federal lands. The program is an actionable subsidy under the SCM Agreement because it provides coal …

Afghanistan Legislative Commitments To The Wto: A Deeper Look At Afghanistan's Compliance With Trips, Hafizullah Seddiqi

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In 2016, Afghanistan formally acceded to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to improve its worldwide trading prospects. However, this journey began much earlier. To join the WTO, one of Afghanistan's commitments was to reform its then-existing trademark laws. Intellectual property (IP)-related laws are, in general, one of the fields that countries must reform prior to joining the WTO, so as to be in accordance with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). While Afghanistan has enacted some IPrelated statutes, including the 2009 Law on Trade Marks Registration, it continues to fall short of conforming to TRIPS because …

The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act: The Double-Edged Sword Of U.S. Foreign Investment Regulations, J. Russell Blakey

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is Data Localization A Solution For Schrems Ii?, Anupam Chander

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For the second time this decade, the Court of Justice of the European Union has struck a blow against the principal mechanisms for personal data transfer to the United States. In Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland, Maximillian Schrems, the Court declared the EU-US Privacy Shield invalid and placed significant hurdles to the process of transferring personal data from the European Union to the United States via the mechanism of Standard Contractual Clauses. Many have begun to suggest data localization as the solution to the problem of data transfer; that is, don’t transfer the data at all. I argue …

Modern Provisions In Investment Treaties, Jesse Coleman

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Governments are pursuing substantive and procedural reform of the international investment regime in recognition that there are fundamental, systemic, and interrelated concerns about current approaches to investment governance, and that current approaches have failed to meet their purported objectives.

A vast majority of the 1,023 publicly-known treaty-based claims have been brought under “old-generation” treaties. In 2018, for example, 60% of such claims were brought under treaties originally concluded in the 1990s or earlier, and all but one was filed under a pre-2011 treaty. These old-generation treaties include vague and far-reaching obligations for states, generally do not include any reference to …

Investment Promotion And Facilitation For Sustainable Development, Brooke Guven

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Investment is a critical component of sustainable development. In particular, under the right conditions, foreign direct investment (FDI) can improve economic growth and living standards, create jobs, transfer technology and know-how and result in supply chain upgrading. However, its benefits are not automatic, and, if not carefully governed, investment can result in harm to the environment, labour standards and lead to tax evasion or other undesirable outcomes. Investment promotion and investment facilitation, in turn, can help states attract, expand and retain FDI.

Sticky Bits, Cree Jones, Weijia Rao

Faculty Scholarship

One of the defining features of international investment law is its enforceability; almost all bilateral investment treaties (“BITs”) in a network of more than 3,200 agreements allow enforcement through investor-state arbitration. Thus, if a host country violates a treaty and harms a protected investment, the investor can bring a direct enforcement action against the host country through international arbitration. More than 800 enforcement actions have been initiated by investors, and more than seventy billion dollars have been awarded by arbitrators. The enforcement of international investment law has also given rise to a critique that arbitrators are expanding treaty protections through …

Trips And Its Contents, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

In 2006, I published TRIPS and Its Discontents in a symposium commemorating the tenth anniversary of the WTO TRIPS Agreement. At that time, developing countries were deeply discontent with the Agreement and the new and higher intellectual property standards that the WTO had imposed upon them. By contrast, when the TRIPS Agreement was about to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary in April 2019, the developing countries' trenchant critiques of the Agreement were mostly gone. Also disappearing were their usual accusations of neoimperialism.

What has happened? Have developing countries successfully adjusted, or become sensitized, to the high intellectual property standards in the …

Interpretation Of Article V Of The New York Convention In The Eleventh Circuit: Industrial Risk Insurers, Juan C. Garcia, Ivan Bracho Gonzalez

University of Miami Law Review

The widespread use and growing preference for international arbitration over cross-border litigation is primarily due to the existence of a clear and straightforward regime for the enforcement of arbitration agreements and awards. Even though this was not always the case, through the appearance of the New York Convention and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (“UNCITRAL”) Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, the treatment and acceptance of international arbitration in different legal regimes has undergone a harmonization process which has served to develop consistency. That harmonization process, however, has not been completed. Several jurisdictions, even within their own …

South Dakota V. Wayfair: An Ill-Conceived Blow To The Free Flow Of Interstate Commerce, Revel Shinn Atkinson

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

For more than a century, brick-and-mortar retailers have been losing local customers—first with the rise of mail-order houses and then more acutely with the rapid growth of online retail. As a result, states have noticed a significant loss in sales tax revenue. While an equivalent amount of tax is typically still owed to the state in the form of a use tax, which is to be remitted to the state by the customer, because these taxes are not automatically collected at the time of the sale, customers have overwhelmingly elected not to pay them. In an effort to recover this …

Three Essays On International Trade Policies, Xin Yi

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the empirical and quantitative implications of trade policies. The first chapter examines the effects of trade policies on quality specialization across cities within a country. Specifically, we complement the quality specialization literature in international trade and study how larger cities within a country produce goods with higher quality. We first establish three stylized facts on how product quality is related to agglomeration, firm productivity, and worker skills. We then rationalize these facts in a spatial equilibrium model where all the elements mentioned above are present and firms are free to choose their locations. Using firm-level data from …

Can Soft Words Lead To Strong Deeds? A Comparative Analysis Of Corporate Human Rights Commitments’ Enforcement, Adeline Michoud

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.

An Inquiry Into The Scope Of Mfn Provisions In Bilateral Investment Treaties, Amit Kumar Sinha

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

This article inquires into the scope of MFN treatment in Bilateral Investment Treaties. The article primarily analyzes the ways in which MFN treatment may be extended to foreign investors; this includes extending favorable treatment to a foreign investor in cases of internal/domestic measures and borrowing more favorable provisions from third-party BITs. This article attempts to shed light on the interpretation and dynamics of the use of MFN provisions for internal measures. It also delves into the rationale for borrowing provisions from third-party BITs. It further presents a critique of various tribunals’ decisions and scholarly discussions and writings that deal with …

China's Belt And Road Initiative: An Examination Of Project Financing Issues And Alternatives, August Nelson Dinwiddie

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

In 2013, China launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to realize the vision of revitalizing the ancient Silk Road. The BRI can be characterized as a vast infrastructure development initiative spanning over sixty-five countries that total almost half of the world's GDP. Since its launch, BRI projects have primarily been financed through commercial loans provided by Chinese banks, creating concerns over debt sustainability. At the top of these concerns are fears over whether participation in the BRI will lead to a "debt-trap scenaro." Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) provide an alternative financing option. In project development under a PPP, particularly the …

Kosovo's Controversial 100 Percent Tariff: An Analysis Of Its Imposition And The Issues Bleeding Into The Conflict Between Kosovo And Serbia, Ernira Mehmetaj

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

On November 6, 2018, Kosovo imposed a 10 percent tariff on products imported from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later that month, on November 28, 2018, after Kosovo was denied membership in the International Criminal Police Organization, Kosovo increased the custom tariffs on Serbian and Bosnian goods from 10 to 100 percent. These actions resulted in a standstill of the European Union–mandated Belgrade-Pristina dialogue—a dialogue seeking to normalize the relations between the two states. Having the tumultuous history shared by Kosovo and Serbia as a backdrop, this Note analyzes the international agreements Kosovo is party to, specifically the Central European …

Introduction To The Symposium On Soft And Hard Law On Business And Human Rights, Steven R. Ratner

Articles

This symposium turns to a major debate within a field of international law that has moved from the periphery to center stage in just a few decades—business and human rights, or BHR: Can and should international law's approach to the human rights impacts of business activity shift from today's mostly soft-law framework to a multilateral treaty regime? While advocates for and against such a treaty debate this point at the UN Human Rights Council and other venues, this symposium examines the problem from four theoretical perspectives. Each contribution offers insights for practitioners and scholars alike, but they suggest no easy …

The International Claims Trade, Kathleen Claussen

Cardozo Law Review

Investments are mobile in the twenty-first century international economy. They are seldom held for their duration by a single owner from a single country. They change hands and they do so for a variety of reasons, often in the course of a dispute. But the scholarship addressing what happens when international investments and legal claims against sovereigns regarding those investments change hands appears only at the margins. The practice of buying and selling claims or claims trading is well known and institutionalized in some areas of domestic litigation. For cross-border investment disputes against sovereigns, however, many of the cases discussing …

Discrimination And Privacy Concerns At The Intersection Of Healthcare And Big Data, James Koenderman

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.