CReDItIs SIGNED

Project "CReDItIs" data sheet

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 Partnership

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 Project objective

The protection of international investments by international agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and its enforcement by Investor-State Dispute Settlement is currently subject of an important political debate. That debate pits the goal of attracting and protecting international investments against that of avoiding the exploitation of host countries and undermining their domestic law. CReDItIs will develop a new theoretical foundation for international investment law, putting particular emphasis on systematic and theoretical rigour and using expropriation as a case-study. It challenges the dominant stance of legal scholarship by using both legal theory and legal-empirical research. For orthodox scholars, the law in international treaties is authoritatively defined by what 'authorities' have said. Ad hoc investment tribunals adjudicate on investment disputes on the basis of mostly bilateral investment agreements. These awards do not have formal precedential value, and the agreements they rely upon are similar, but not identical. Yet not only are awards of great factual importance, legal scholarship believes that they can somehow be applied even to treaties on which they do not adjudicate. In contrast, for legal-realist empiricism, the law is what the courts decide. CReDItIs will contrast these views with the Pure Theory of Law, which is a legal theory arguing that seeing law as norms is possible without admixing it with nonlegal norms, or reducing law to facts. It will highlight the factual importance of awards and treaties through the use of empirical tools such as citation network analysis while distinguishing this from false designs to unify and concretise these results as law. The law remains fragmented; the law remains unspecific, even if and when judicial pronouncements and treaties are similarly worded.