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Thread: Biden comes out against international arbitration afters Dems long support. Why? In a new piece in @PoPpublicsphere @NikKalyanpur look at how the international investment regime has become a speculators game/its consequences. https://www.law360.com/articles/1295978/biden-comes-out-against-special-tribunals-for-corporations
2/Drawing on work from sociology, we argue that the rise of third-party funding in international arbitration resulted from cross-field interactions between international law and finance. https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqln1mpq5up9gca/FinancializationOfLaw.PoP.08042020.docx?dl=0
3/Third party funding is the practice of third parties like hedge funds that invest in legal disputes and receive portions of potential claims. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-lawsuits-finance-insight/want-to-sue-venezuela-for-millions-these-firms-can-help-for-a-price-idUSKCN1OK0EP
4/This practice has grown significantly since the Great Recession and is in part contributing to the rise of international arbitration and new "inderect" expropriations. https://core.ac.uk/reader/144821900
5/As a result, the investment regime has become financialized so that international law becomes an investment vehicle. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09692290.2020.1764378
6/We argue that the financial crisis played a big role in this transformation. It forced the financial field to look for new investment opportunities and it forced the legal field to look for new material and status opportunities. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/insight-litigation-finance-in-a-down-economy-benefits-lawyers-clients-alike
7/It looks like the pandemic has reenergized this dynamic. https://www.law360.com/articles/1261213/third-party-funders-business-is-booming-during-pandemic
8/Theoretically, our piece demonstrates how regimes (like the investment regime) can take an unexpected path as actors from different field interact. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2010.01385.x
9/Empirically, we show how international law has been financialized and become a speculators game. Over the long term, we expect that this will only drive the further politicization of the regime. @toddntucker @taylor__stjohn @geoffreygertz
