The first twenty years of international negotiation on climate change took an approach that was guaranteed to fail: attempting to solve an immensely complex issue through a single, legally binding agreement. The history of diplomacy in trade and security shows that success requires a different approach: breaking a problem up into manageable parts, and growing agreement gradually, strengthening it as parties’ interests increasingly converge.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

Any assessment of the international investment regime and its legitimacy crisis requires a preliminary understanding of their important and relevant features. However, the sprawling nature of both defies most doctrinal and qualitative attempts at description. The regime is based on a decentralized network of legal instruments, different procedural mechanisms and ad hoc proceedings, while the accompanying chorus of critique and counter-critique is populated with multiple actors and interests across the world. This chapter seeks to capture this distinct and fragmented universe. First, the authors map consent to arbitration, not on a generic per signed bilateral investment treaty basis, but rather by tracking multilateral, bilateral and unilateral consents in force. Second, they provide a description and overview of the over 1,100 registered cases up to January 2020, focusing inter alia on case outcomes, rules, cases types, institution, parties, economic sector and legal basis. Third, they trace discontent with regime, charting the origin of legitimacy crisis and its maturing over time. It ends by discussing both state-led efforts at reform and the extent to which arbitrators themselves have adjusted reflexively to the backlash.

A key response to legitimacy concerns over investment arbitration has been to point to the contribution of investment treaties to significant increases in in-bound foreign investment. The authors return to this vexed question of whether treaties offer material benefits and the large literature on the topic. Through a mixed methods approach and heightened awareness of the synergies and tensions within and between methodological approaches, they: (1) analyse econometrically the impact of ISDS provisions on inbound FDI; (2) present new qualitative research on investor and host state practices and attitudes; and (3) argue that social psychological research on cultural risk cognition is useful for both framing and presenting research questions and findings. They conclude that whatever the results that emerge from empirical research findings, the form of presentation will determine whether they will be accepted by the public or fall victim to growing polarization in perceptions and positions.

The interaction of developing states with investment treaty law and arbitration constitutes an important part of the ongoing debate about the legitimacy of the investment treaty regime. However, the authors contend that the concern is often sidelined and that developing states and their concerns are frequently lumped together under the broader rubric of investment treaty law as a threat to national sovereignty and a constraint on regulatory autonomy. By focusing on the formal equality between contracting state parties and the reciprocal nature of international investment agreements (IIAs), the chapter contends that such narratives tend to mask the presence of power disparities, which considerably shape the involvement of developing states in the creation, diffusion and internalization of investment treaty law. The authors seek to counter these narratives by drawing on new empirical data to expose a range of structural, normative and institutional power inequalities. By using the optics of power and focusing on how developing states learn from and internalize investment treaty law, the chapter peers behind the formal structures of investment treaties and ISDS to identify the underlying processes and actors and to question the legitimacy of the prevailing norms and institutional arrangements.

This chapter highlights “agreements” and other legal instruments as the most convenient and functional mechanism by which existing private law can recognize algorithms. Algorithms with verifiable state can be the basis for contractual terms and conditions and can thereby be recognized by legal processes. This general mechanism is a better practical and conceptual fit than other proposed legal treatments for algorithms, such as the common law of agency (i.e., vicarious action).

The chapter surveys the literature and approaches that deal with the economics and politics of managing internationally shared water resources (aka transboundary water). Principles that are relevant to the analysis of management of shared international water are discussed and demonstrated. One aspect that is unique to international water is the use of agreements between all or part of the riparian states that share the basin. The chapter introduces several means by which cooperation among the riparian states is defined and calculated, using the information embedded in the treaties that they signed. The chapter provides also an example, applied to the case of the Blue Nile Basin, of the effect of using certain allocation methods on the welfare of the river basin riparian states, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt, and its effects on the stability of their allocation agreement.

This chapter considers the centrality of price to the contract for the sale of good. In particular, it examines the role of the price in the contract’s certainty of terms, the exceptions to this requirement, and the operation of those exceptions. The statutory provisions for determining a price in a contract that is silent on the term are examined, as are the leading cases. Contracts for the sale of goods are defined and distinguished from contracts in which goods are exchanged partly for a money consideration, and partly in exchange for other goods. The chapter also examines when such agreement may constitute a contract for the sale of goods, and when it constitutes a barter contract. The performance of the contract of sale is then examined in terms of the reciprocal obligations of payment and delivery. The wrongful performance of both payment and delivery is considered. The chapter then examines the remedies available to the buyer and the seller for breaches of payment or delivery, depending on whether the breach is of a condition or a warranty, and the defences to claims by either party against the other.