The publications listed here represent a small selection of the work of staff members of the GCILS. To see full listings of publications please click through to the University of Glasgow main webpages in each individual staff member profile.
Investment Protection, Human Rights, and International Arbitration in Extraordinary Times
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The interaction of investment protection, human rights, and international arbitration is complex. Theories on their interaction are helpful starting points. At the same time, general formulas reach their limits as soon as it comes to evaluating concrete issues. In twelve chapters, the present volume therefore analyses different thematic interactions between investment law and human rights in order to develop a more context-specific understanding. With contributions by Filip Balcerzak, Gustavo Becker, Christina Binder, Tillmann Rudolf Braun, Barnali Choudhury, Henner Gött, Martin Gronemann, Edward Guntrip, Malte Gutt, Anna Hankings-Evans, Rainer Hofmann, Markus Krajewski, Juan Ignacio Massun, Tomasz Milej, Julian Scheu, Stephan W. Schill, Peter-Tobias Stoll, Christian J. Tams and Anne van Aaken.
Nomos, Baden-Baden, 2022
ISBN print: 978-3-8487-7405-0, ISBN online: 978-3-7489-1406-8
Swords, Shields and Other Beasts: The Role of Countermeasures in Investment Arbitration
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"Our topic can be thought of as a meeting of the old and the new, and it can be approached via a straightforward question: is there room, in the contemporary world of investment arbitration, for countermeasures, that traditional means of self-help? Countermeasures—and more so the concept’s traditional label, reprisals—evoke an era of interstate international law of limited reach: an era which, for lack of adequate institutions, accommodated ideas of ‘private justice’ to a significant extent, notably by accepting the right of one State to respond to another State’s wrongful conduct by means of coercion. This right permitted the State to respond to wrongful conduct affecting State rights as well as rights of nationals, despite the obvious risk of abuse. As investment lawyers with a measure of historical awareness know full well, in the field of foreign investment, the risk of abuse regularly materialised, as ‘home States’ (in the contemporary parlance) reacted coercively against host States accused of having interfered with rights of foreign investors. (...)"
article in ICSID Review - Foreign Investment Law Journal, Volume 37, Issue 1-2, Winter/Spring 2022, Pages 121–137,
ISSN 0258-3690, EISSN 2049-1999
The ILC Articles at 20
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“The Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (Articles), developed by the International Law Commission (ILC), turn 20 this year. On 9 August 2001 – 45 years after the first report by Special Rapporteur Francisco García-Amador on the topic, after 5 Special Rapporteurs and 34 reports by them – the ILC adopted the final text of the Articles, thus bringing to an end work that (in the words of Rosalyn Higgins) were it not for the Commission’s broad understanding of responsibility, ‘should on the face of it [have] take[n] one summer’s work’.3 On 12 December 2001, the UN General Assembly ‘noted’ the Articles and commended them to the attention of Governments in December.4 Since then, reflected in successive reports compiled by the UN Secretary-General, the Articles have become the obvious reference point for debates about State responsibility: they are invoked, applied, cited, criticised, studied by nearly everyone working in or with international law, from undergraduate students to investment tribunals, and even domestic courts.5 They reflect international law’s everyday, routine, application: mostly unspectacular, sometimes pedestrian; dramatic only rarely. What is more, most readers, users, students, critics have been quick to adopt the ILC’s jargon and categories.”
GCILS Working Paper Series
Human rights (In: d’Aspremont, J. and Haskell, J. (eds.) Tipping Points in International Law: Commitment and Critique)
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The original critique of human rights is well known. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, scholars drew attention to various blind spots in the human rights project. Feminists demonstrated its failure in representing and protecting women, just as parallel limitations were targeted by queer and disabled activists, finding powerful institutional battlegrounds in the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations. TWAIL and post-colonial scholars critiqued the colonial imagery of ‘victims, savages and saviors’ that underpinned the movement, and many critiques intersected multiple communities.
Scott, D. M. (2021) Human rights. In: d'Aspremont, J. and Haskell, J. (eds.) Tipping Points in International Law: Commitment and Critique. Series: ASIL studies in international legal theory. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, pp. 172-195. (doi: 10.1017/9781108954549.010)
ISBN 9781108845106
The politics of the moot court. (published in European Journal of International Law)
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(doi: 10.1093/ejil/chab068) Scholarship has generally represented moot court competitions in one of two ways: either as a beneficial way for students to develop practical skills prior to the Bar, or as a reproducer of hierarchy and exclusion. This review essay attempts to plot a third way of thinking about moots, one that finds critical potential in the exercise of mooting while remaining attentive to its conservative biases. Building out from a critique of the common law focus of Thomas and Cradduck’s The Art of Mooting, the essay reflects on how critical approaches to international law can be used to teach moot skills more effectively. The essay then turns to the limitations such a critical pedagogy must be aware of within the actual practice of the competition, considering how these limits can be navigated and even flipped into teachable moments for critically inclined students. The essay closes with a call for a more nuanced discussion about the use of experiential learning, of which moots are only one example, for fostering critical engagement with international law.
Scott, D. M. and Soirila, U. (2021) The politics of the moot court. European Journal of International Law, 32(3), pp. 1079-1106.
0938-5428
The Discipline as a Field of Struggle: The Politics and Economics of Knowledge Production in International Law
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"International Law's Invisible Frames. Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes" Edited by Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch Examines the social cognition and knowledge production processes which form our understanding of what international law is, and how it works Identifies the groups of people and institutions that shape and alter the prevailing discourse in international law An innovative, interdisciplinary approach employing insights from sociology, psychology, and behavioural science
A chapter in Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch (eds), International Law’s Invisible Frames (Oxford University Press, 2021)
ISBN: 9780192847539
