Public Purpose in International Law
Rethinking Regulatory Sovereignty in the Global Era

This book explores how public purpose doctrine reconciles conflicting obligations of states to engage in regulatory sovereignty while honoring host-state obligations to protect foreign investment.

Pedro J. Martinez-Fraga (Author), C. Ryan Reetz (Author)

9781107081741, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 February 2015

470 pages, 5 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.79 kg

'[This book] is certainly one of the most valuable contributions to the much-heated and at times unnecessarily emotional debate about the right balance to be struck between the regulatory space of States and investment protection.' J. Ostransky, Transnational Dispute Management

This text explores how the public purpose doctrine reconciles the often conflicting, but equally binding, obligations that states have to engage in regulatory sovereignty while honoring host-state obligations to protect foreign investment. The work examines the multiple permutations and iterations of the public purpose doctrine and concludes that this principle needs to be reconceptualized to meet the imperatives of economic globalization and of a new paradigm of sovereignty that is based on the interdependence, and not independence, of states. It contends that the historical expression of the public purpose doctrine in customary and conventional international law is fraught with fundamental flaws that, if not corrected, will give rise to disparities in the relationship between investors and states, asymmetries with respect to industrialized nations and developing states, and, ultimately, process legitimacy concerns.

1. Public purpose in NAFTA
2. Identifying public purpose in customary international law: select international instruments
3. Defining the profile of the public purpose doctrine in human rights conventions
4. The effect of bilateral investment treaties on the public purpose doctrine and the public purpose doctrine's distortion of symmetry in bilateral investment treaties: discerning order and structure
5. Permanent sovereignty over natural resources
6. The role of public purpose in foreign investment protection statutes: can FIPS rehabilitate the doctrine?
Appendix I. A comparison between the performance requirements articles of the Canada-Jordan BIT and the Colombia-Japan BIT
Appendix II. An empirical review of the pre-eminence of the public purpose doctrine throughout the ever-expanding universe of bilateral investment treaties
Appendix III. A spatial comparison of provisions relating to investment protection, incentives, and dispute resolution in foreign-investment promotion statutes and bilateral investment treaties.

Subject Areas: Public international law [LBB], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Law [L]