As reported yesterday, the recent tragedies in Bangladesh factories have resulted in a major breakthrough with the signing of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. Thus far, leading retailers such as H&M, Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Benetton, and Calvin Klein are on board. Notably absent from the list are leading U.S. retailers such as Wal-Mart and Gap.

As noted in my previous post, I have been arguing for years that international arbitration could serve as an important procedural tool for promoting human rights in global supply chains. I applaud the commitment of these retailers to join with leading labor rights groups and enter into a binding agreement to im [...]

This week 170 garment workers in Bangladesh died after the Rana Plaza building collapsed. A few months ago 112 garment workers in Bangladesh died after the Tazreen Fashions garment factory was destroyed by fire. Both tragedies were the result of inadequate fire and safety standards.

These tragedies could not have come at a worst time for major retailers that purchase garments from these factories. For months the International Labor Rights Forum and other labor rights groups have encouraged garment retailers to sign a binding agreement that would create a system of rigorous inspections, transparency and oversight. Thus far, they have had limited success, with only the parent company of [...]

Gary Born’s latest addition to the international arbitration literature, International Arbitration: Law and Practice, is a nice bookend to his magisterial two-volume work on the same subject. Rather than simply condense his 3,000 page tome into a 500-page summary, he has done something completely different: offer a concise, ready-reference, black-letter guide to international arbitration.

The text is brief and clear, offering a concise outline of the subject. But the book goes further, presenting charts, checklists, tables, statistics, and flowcharts. It is precisely the kind of book that my students would buy to prepare for my final exam on international arbitration. It is also the k [...]

I have posted on SSRN my latest article, “Ancillary Discovery to Prove Denial of Justice” just published in the Virginia Journal of International Law. It analyzes Section 1782 discovery proceedings in the context of BIT arbitration and argues that there is now uniform agreement among federal courts that investment arbitration panels are “international tribunals” within the meaning of Section 1782.

But the article has salience outside that context, and could be applied to many foreign or international proceedings. One plaintiff involved in a French proceeding, for example, served a discovery subpoena on a French party while he was visiting a museum on vacation in the United States, thereb [...]

My friend and colleague David Caron, C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, has been named the new Dean at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London. The press release is here.

I have known David Caron for over twenty years and always thought he would make an excellent Dean or Judge. He has tremendous administrative experience, having served at the highest levels at ASIL, the ABA’s Section on International Law, the Law of Sea Institute, and the Institute for Transnational Arbitration.

He also brings a wealth of international law knowledge to the subject, including public and private dispute resolution, international cour [...]

So we all know that investment arbitration tribunals have relied on WTO precedent for persuasive authority as to the meaning of various terms in bilateral investment treaties. (Think the emergency exception in the Argentina arbitrations and references to WTO Article XXI). But does the reverse also happen? Do WTO panels or the WTO Appellate Body reference investment arbitration awards as persuasive authority?

The short answer is almost never. The only significant example was four years ago when the WTO Appellate Body addressed the question of what to do about past precedent. A crisis was brewing within the WTO because a WTO panel had openly disagreed with an earlier Appellate Body ruling [...]