Please note that the disputation will be streamed and some of the seats behind the candidate will be visible for those who are watching.
Participate at the disputation here
A recorded version of the trial lecture will be available here from February 22nd
A digital version of the thesis can be ordered by e-mail to: k.h.paulsen@jus.uio.no
Adjudication committee
- Professor Giuditta Cordero-Moss, University of Oslo (leader)
- Professor Michael Waibel, University of Vienna (1. opponent)
- Associate Professor Wolfgang Alschner, University of Ottawa (2. opponent)
Chair of defence
Dean Ragnhild Hennum
Supervisors
- Professor Malcolm Langford
- Associale professor Daniel Behn
- Professor Carl Henrik Knutsen
Summary
Who really decides in International Investment Law?
While there are just over a thousand cases throughout International Investment Law’s history, the compensation awarded to private foreign investors is significant. Cases where the investor has won, regularly trigger damages well north of the billion-dollar mark and can cause major financial challenges for the losing state. The system has long been the subject of a legitimacy debate that has included a major reform process. One of the lingering questions that permeates this debate, and which this research addresses, is who is really in charge?
Unlike other international economic legal systems such as the WTO, there is no central authority, nor an all-encompassing treaty. The responsibilities and power structures are distributed and are therefore challenging to identify. Instead, there are a multitude of actors all having an influence on how the system is designed and operated: states who are both respondents in arbitrations as well as the authors of the underlying bilateral agreements, investors who seek redress for violations of the agreements, but as this study documents, perhaps most importantly, the practitioners who litigate the cases and apply the multitude of rules on a day-to-day basis.
Using data to unveil the actors of influence
The thesis presents how big data and machine learning can be used to better understand the overarching functioning of a legal system. Through systematic analysis, it shows that it is possible to uncover patterns in the systems that are difficult to unravel only through analysis of individual cases or legal texts alone. Through a full text analysis of 3,500 agreements between states and all publicly available case documents, this thesis investigates which states, individuals and not least which eras have had the greatest influence on the development of the system.
A system stuck in the past?
The analysis reveals a system where a small group capital exporting Western European states established the system's main rules in the latter half of the 20th century. The development of the agreements then stopped completely at the end of the 90s, and the development of the system was shifted to the practitioners and arbitrators. Throughout the 21st century, the influence of the arbitral tribunals gradually increased, and the United States' position as a major power in the system was cemented through a large number of claims brought by American companies.
The analyses thus show a situation where a small group of states defined how the system should work, then an entire world that reproduced model, and then subsequently left the system to, in practice, a small group of arbitrators and practitioners, who with very limited democratic anchoring informally continued the development of the system.