Scholarship

This chapter examines the multifaceted role of philanthropy as an influential actor in shaping international law. Traditionally overshadowed by states, philanthropic organizations have increasingly asserted themselves across various dimensions of international governance - from normative development to dispute resolution. Initially influential through landmark initiatives in humanitarian law and peace advocacy, philanthropy's imprint has expanded into global health, environmental protection, and human rights, often through strategic partnerships with states and international institutions. By financing pivotal litigation, promoting policy reforms, and engaging in direct advocacy, philanthropic entities effectively shape international law beyond mere financial support, prompting discussions of legitimacy and concerns over privatization and ideological influence. Through case studies spanning from early humanitarian interventions to contemporary global health and climate initiatives, this analysis illustrates how philanthropy contributes not only financially but structurally, fundamentally redefining the landscape of international law.

Conflicts between legal orders can be resolved in various ways: one legal order might insist on its primacy, or, alternatively, legal techniques and concepts can be invoked to leave each order to its own space – and mitigate the frictions when they collide. In the past decade, the Achmea saga from the European Court of Justice has attracted enormous attention, in part, because it is seen as the epitome of a hard clash between the law of the European Union and international investment law. In this article, we argue that this interpretation may be misguided, wheareas a close reading of Achmea and the court’s subsequent judgments is compatible with an ordered pluralism that could, in the long run, leave room for harmonized ways for these regimes to co-exist.

Un contrat conclu avec une organisation internationale pose des problèmes spécifiques, propres au statut particulier de ce cocontractant. Compte-tenu de la présence d’un grand nombre d’organisations internationales à Genève, il a semblé utile aux éditeurs scientifiques de proposer aux lecteurs certaines clauses topiques des conditions générales utilisées par l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour tous les contrats de fourniture de biens ou de services.

Rosters of adjudicators are increasingly used in investor-State dispute-settlement (“ISDS”). They come in several varieties, including formal, institutional rosters and informal ones. Rosters respond to several shortcomings of party appointments and could enhance transparency of arbitral appointments. Such transparency could in turn promote the values of diversity and efficiency in ISDS. This contribution considers the implications of rosters for transparency, and their effects on individual appointments and in aggregate.

The deployment of machine learning methods and artificial intelligence in the context of legal decision-making will require a thorough look at the concept of variance - be it that original to human decision-makers, or that of automated systems. Human judges are, indeed, noisy in their decisions, a fact that, though deplorable from the viewpoint of individual cases, may have systemic value for the legal framework as a whole: in particular, individual variance in legal cases functions as an information-collection device that propagates, throughout the legal system, a potential lack of fit between the norm and its application, in call for a resolution. Besides, in justice as in machine learning, randomness and variance are increasingly not merely a byproduct but a fundamental aspect that enables these systems to avoid being trapped in sub-optimal configurations. In this context, this Note offers some reflections on whether algorithmic methods should seek to suppress or replicate variance in legal decision-making, and what principles should govern any deployment of deliberate, automated variance.

As the regulatory landscape grows increasingly complex, legal analytics is emerging as a transformative tool for risk management and compliance. By applying advanced data analysis techniques such as machine learning and natural language processing to vast volumes of legal and regulatory data, firms can shift from static, retrospective approaches to dynamic, forward-looking strategies. Legal analytics enables organizations to identify trends, predict risks, and make informed decisions, fostering a more proactive and strategic legal management framework.

This chapter explores the evolving role of legal analytics in business, highlighting its applications in privacy compliance, fraud prevention, and legal counsel monitoring. By contextualizing legal analytics within the broader discipline of Law & Management, this chapter underscores its potential to align compliance with competitiveness, redefine legal risk, and bridge the gap between legal and strategic decision-making in today’s data-driven business environment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have crashed into the scene in late 2022, with ChatGPT in particular bringing to the mainstream what has before this remained within the domain of the initiates. This paper introduces the main features of LLMs and related Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the legal community, while reviewing their potential application in a legal context, as well as the main questions and issues raised by their increasing presence in a jurist’s life. Adopting a structural approach, the analysis highlights the areas of legal activity that stand to gain – or lose – from the generalisation of LLMs in our workflow. The radical innovation represented by LLMs will force jurists to rethink their approach to the law, their own role in it, and the future of legal education and training.

In a world where some multinational enterprises (MNEs) earn revenues higher than most states, it is no surprise that their corresponding impact—and responsibilities—on the environment and the respect of human rights have grown accordingly. States, be they home or host to these MNEs, are legitimately concerned about this impact. While environmental and human rights considerations can too often be pushed under the rug in the context of a global competition for investment and foreign capital, states are also increasingly seeking to enrol large business ventures in their own quest to further compliance with international rights standards. The difficulty consists in doing so without sacrificing the role of MNEs in spurring growth and economic development.

S’il en faut croire la plupart des commentateurs, la qualité du droit français est en baisse perpétuelle. Remédier à cette dégradation est l’objectif des acteurs publics depuis plusieurs décennies, de circulaires en guides de légistique. Ces tentatives ont-elles cependant permis une amélioration de la « qualité » de la loi ? A l’aide des données obtenues sur Légifrance et des outils de « natural language processing », et des recommandations légistiques, il est possible de retracer en partie les évolutions qui ont été ou non réalisées dans la rédaction du droit français. L’analyse met en lumière des améliorations probables de forme, mais la qualité des lois nouvelles demeure une question qui échappe à la résolution.

This Chapter reviewed the standards and practice of impartiality for judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS).

"Reading" is the primary technology investment arbitration practitioners use to engage with party submissions, prior awards, investment treaties and all other written materials relevant to the arbitration. Yet, an alternative and complementary approach to parse investor-state arbitration (ISA) texts is rapidly emerging. In what is variably known as "text mining", "text analytics", or "computational analysis", algorithms rather than humans are beginning to digest written materials to extract relevant insights. What this algorithmic approach lacks in nuance (computers are bad at understanding text), it makes up for in efficiency (computers excel at crunching numbers). This chapter targeted at arbitration professionals introduces the methodologies underpinning text analytics, explains and evaluates their use cases in investment arbitration, and assesses their promises and limitations.

‘Noise’ is the unjustified and unwanted variance in a set of judgments over comparable issues. Together with bias, Noise is a driver of error in decision-making. As argued by the authors of the bestseller ‘Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment’, every set of judgments or decisions (in legal proceedings or otherwise) evidence statistical ‘Noise’, and more of it than is commonly believed. Such variance has corrosive, if often concealed, consequences in terms of fairness, efficiency and legitimacy. In this article we demonstrate that there is likely to be substantial Noise in international arbitration proceedings, which is driven by features inherent to the arbitral process (though further features also help mitigate it). We present our Noise Audit and identify examples of Noise in publicly-available awards. We conclude with a number of recommendations to minimize Noise, in order to forge a pathway towards greater consistency in international arbitration.

This chapter highlights notable contributions made by investment treaty tribunals during 2020 in the areas of provisional measures, merits, quantum, other remedies, settlements, annulments, and domestic challenges to awards.

International litigation and arbitration hinges on the use (and, sometimes, misuse) of “authorities” (i.e., precedents and the teaching and writings of “publicists”). Parties spend time and effort marshalling supportive authorities, distinguishing or refuting unhelpful ones, and monitoring legal developments in unrelated cases and in academic debates to bolster their legal arguments.

This practice has profound implications, for many key issues of international law (sources, role of precedent, etc.) are also questions about the nature, scope and relevance of authorities in international dispute settlement. There is however little research on the practice of citing authorities in international disputes, and even less empirical research that sheds light on such citations.

This thesis relies on data-led analyses that leverage the breadth of the collected dataset to identify noteworthy phenomena in the practice of citing in international legal disputes. On this basis, the thesis offers four novel contributions to international law scholarship.

First, it investigates whet determines the “authoritativeness” of authorities in international law, i.e., what makes them authoritative as opposed to merely persuasive. Relevant factors include an authority’s age, author, or main topic. Second, it identifies the differences in the citation practices of different protagonists in international disputes, and attaches these differences to distinct strategic motives. Third, the thesis concludes that the central role of authorities international legal debates means that authorities circumscribe what is international law and what is not; in other words, the “citable” tends to delimit the boundaries of what is considered international law.

The fourth and last contribution lies in the Dataset collected to conduct these analyses, which includes nearly 200,000 citations to precedents and scholarly teachings from more than 7,000 documents in cases before the ICJ, the ITLOS, WTO panels, investment arbitration tribunals and the IUSCT. This unprecedented Dataset, and the methods used to gather it, will hopefully serve as a basis or as a blueprint for future empirical research in international dispute settlement.

This chapter highlights notable contributions made by investment treaty tribunals during 2019 in the areas of provisional measures, merits, quantum, other remedies, settlements, annulments, and domestic challenges to awards.

The Iran-US Claims Tribunal was instituted in 1981 to hear claims from the two governments and their nationals after they broke diplomatic and economic ties. Upon deciding hundreds of cases, the Tribunal has been hailed as an example of a successful international adjudicative body, and as a source of inspiration for international dispute-settlement scholars. Less often acknowledged, however, the Tribunal's output also constitutes a formidable and under-investigated dataset, ripe for empirical and data-oriented analysis. Such an analysis confirms the Tribunal's enduring relevance and sheds light on older and newer debates in international dispute-settlement scholarship. The oft-mentioned charge that the Tribunal's party-appointed members were "political", or the practice of issuing dissenting opinions, can be reviewed under this lens, as they lessons for international law scholars and practitioners today.

This chapter explores how empirical methods drawn from data science - such as stylometry, network analysis, and linguistic forensics - can illuminate the involvement and influence of often overlooked actors in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Traditionally perceived as a 'black box,' the inner workings of international tribunals, including the roles played by tribunal secretaries, institutional assistants, and other hidden contributors, remain opaque despite their significant impact on the legitimacy and authority of adjudicative outcomes. Leveraging computational tools such as Python-based text analysis, regular expressions, network analysis, and stylometric methods, this study empirically investigates the drafting roles of tribunal secretaries and assistants, challenging assumptions about authorship, delegation, and decision-making legitimacy in ISDS. The chapter particularly scrutinizes claims around ICSID's alleged streamlining of language in arbitration awards and presents empirical evidence illuminating these otherwise concealed practices. By introducing accessible empirical methodologies, this research underscores the value and necessity of data-oriented approaches to fully understand the dynamics of legitimacy and authorship in international arbitration.

A common complaint of arbitration litigants is that arbitral proceedings are too long (and then, costly), and increasingly so. Blame is sometimes, if not often, put on the arbitrators: too busy with concurrent appointments, they have no time to dedicate to the particular dispute they have been appointed to.

In what follows, I try to retrace the role of the Secretariat in drafting WTO panel and AB reports by subjecting these documents to a stylometric analysis.

Using state-of-the-art information extraction, this article identifies 1865 references of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to its own decisions or that of its predecessor between 1948 and 2013. We find that the ICJ self-citation network becomes increasingly complex. Citations are used more frequently and precedents grow more diverse. Two drivers fuel this development. First, jurisprudential specialization clusters citations in ôclassicö international law areas as the ICJ places increased emphasis on the continuity, expertise and predictability of its "settled jurisprudence" asserting its role among competing adjudicatory venues. Second, issue diversification expands citations as disputants increasingly craft their arguments around precedent making ICJ litigation more common-law like. The growth of citations adds complexity as precedent is predominantly used argumentatively to affect outcomes rather than ritualistically to pay tribute to past decisions. Although the growth of citations is an institutional achievement underscoring the Court's continued relevance, it also creates new access-to-justice barriers.

Are separate and dissenting opinions in international investment arbitration proceedings a way for the ‘opiniated’ arbitrators to ‘market’ themselves in view of further appointments?

International economic law is increasingly applied - and in the process developed - by international judicial bodies. As cases from international economic fora are multiplying, the place of their growing jurisprudence in general international law is understudied. To some extent, citation analysis allows for an investigation of the influence of other international judicial bodies over these economic foraùand the authority the latter exhibited in return. Drawing from an original data set of external citations to and from the main international fora (more than 3000 external citations in a larger data set of 75,000 citations), this article examines the citations from and to investment awards and World Trade Organization decisions. It reveals that these fora differ strikingly in their own citation practice, both in terms of the number of external citations but also in terms of the topics prompting the citations. In addition, the analysis shows that these fora are still rarely cited by other international courts and tribunals, pointing to a limited (at least, explicit) influence in contemporary international dispute settlement.