Will appeal to scholars, practitioners and general readers engaging with treaty interpretation at all levels and will enhance the reader's knowledge and mastery of the interpretive process. It will shed light on all those relevant elements and/or connections that the traditional rule-based approach to treaty interpretation largely overlooks.

Helps the reader better understand what it is that international lawyers do when interpreting a treaty.

Contracts are relevant, frequently central, for a significant number of investment disputes. Yet, the way tribunals ascertain their content remains largely underexplored. How do tribunals interpret contracts in investment treaty arbitration? How should they interpret contracts? Does national law have any role to play? Contract Interpretation in Investment Treaty Arbitration: A Theory of the Incidental Issue addresses these questions. The monograph offers a valuable insight into the practice and theory of contract interpretation in investment treaty arbitration. By proposing a theoretical frame for seamless integration of contract interpretation into the overall structure of decision-making, the book contributes to predictability, coherence, sufficiency and correctness of the tribunals’ interpretative practices in investment treaty arbitration.

The rise of investment arbitration in the last decade has generated an unprecedented body of arbitral case law. The work of these arbitral tribunals has provided scholars and practitioners with public international law jurisprudence, including materials on treaty interpretation which has not yet been thoroughly analysed. This book evaluates the contribution of investment arbitration treaty interpretation jurisprudence to international law, covering all key aspects of treaty interpretation. Included in the book's coverage are awards which feature in prominent discussions or in applications of treaty interpretation rules. Among the significant portion of arbitral awards analysed, which deal with investment treaties, are ICSID awards, ad hoc investment arbitration awards, NAFTA awards, and Energy Charter Treaty awards. The extensive analysis of investment arbitration awards and decisions has also been used to create a table highlighting both the references to principles of treaty interpretation and instances in which they were rejected. This invaluable insight into the practice of investment tribunals will be of interest to both practitioners and academics alike. Foreword by by Professor Michael Reisman, Yale Law School _

In Cultural Heritage in International Economic Law, Valentina Vadi offers an account of how international economic law contributes to global cultural governance, analysing the promises and pitfalls of such contributions.

This book uses environmental disputes as a focus to develop a novel comparative analysis of the functions of international adjudication. Paine focuses on three challenges confronting international tribunals: managing change in applicable legal norms or relevant facts, determining the appropriate standard and method of review when scrutinising State conduct for compliance with international obligations, and contributing to wider processes of dispute settlement. The book compares how tribunals manage these challenges across four key sites of international adjudication: adjudication in the World Trade Organization and under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, International Court of Justice litigation, and investment treaty arbitration. It shows that while international tribunals perform several key functions in the contemporary international legal order, they are subject to significant constraints. Paine makes a genuine addition to literature on the role of international adjudication in international law which will benefit academics, practitioners, and policymakers.

Methodological discussion has largely been neglected in human rights research, with legal scholars in particular tending to address research methods and methodological reflection implicitly rather than explicitly. This book advances thinking on human rights methodology, offering instruction and guidance on the methodological options for human rights research.

This book investigates whether treaty interpretation at the ECtHR and WTO, which are sometimes perceived as promoting ‘self-contained’ regimes, could constitute a means for unifying international law, or, conversely, might exacerbate the fragmentation of international law. In this regard, the practice of the ICJ on treaty interpretation is used for comparison, since the ICJ has made the greatest contribution to the development and clarification of international law rules and principles. Providing a critical analysis of cases at the ICJ, ECtHR and WTO, both prior to and since the adoption of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the book reveals how the ECtHR and WTO apply the general rules of treaty interpretation in patterns which are similar to those used by the ICJ to address difficulties in interpreting the text of treaties. Viewed in the light of the ECtHR’s and WTO’s interpretative practices, both the VCLT’s general rules of interpretation and the ICJ’s interpretative practice serve to counteract the fragmentation of international law.

If a treaty from the 1850s regulating 'commerce' or forbidding 'degrading treatment of persons' is to be interpreted 150 years later, does 'commerce' or 'degrading treatment of persons' have the same meaning at the time of interpretation as they had when the treaty was agreed? The evolutionary interpretation of treaties has proven one of the most controversial topics in the practice of international law. Indeed, it has been seen as going against the very grain of the law of treaties, and has been argued to be contrary to the intention of the parties, breaching the principle of consent. This book asks what the place of evolutionary interpretation is within the understanding of treaties, at a time when many important international legal instruments are over 50 years old. It sets out to place the evolutionary interpretation of treaties on a firm footing within the general rule of interpretation, as codified in Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The book demonstrates that the evolutionary interpretation of treaties - in common with all other types of interpretation such as good faith, the text of the treaty, context, object and purpose - is in fact a based upon an objective understanding of the intention of the parties. In order to marry intention and evolution in this way, the book argues that, on the one hand, evolutionary interpretation is the product of the correct application of Article 31 and, on the other, that Article 31 is geared towards the establishment of the intention of the parties. The evolutionary interpretation of treaties is therefore shown to represent an intended evolution.

Valentina Vadi assesses whether cultural heritage has and/or should have any relevance in international investment law and policy.