This article charters the emergence of third-part litigation funding (TPF) in international investment law. It shows how first national and later international legal service providers have litigated to create a favourable legal environment for the emergence of TFP. Legal victories in the national context where hard won and subject to judicial oversight and regulation. On the international level, however, TPF has been approached with a presumption of legality by arbitrators, in a context where few other actors can regulate it. This exacerbates the legal dynamics created by ‘arbitration without privity’, where the investor alone is granted procedural and substantive rights under investment law. TPF allow investors to affect the law strategically. Such developments can take place along the four attributes of priority, durability, universality, and convertibility that construct capital legally. Expanding these attributes creates concomitant obligations for host states. The presumption of legality adopted by arbitrators thus distributes capital from host states to foreign investors. The article ends with discussing why this dynamic is unlikely to change from within the regime.
The Distributive Impact of Third-Party Funding in Investment Arbitration
The Code of Data Capital:
The global data economy has become an integral part of the global economy. It plays a fundamental role in issues of economic distribution and inequality, which has much to do with the legal arrangements and entitlements that shape it. Yet data and data-driven technologies are often conceptualized in terms that do not seem adequate to capture the role they play in global distribution, or which overlook the law as a key mechanism shaping distributional outcomes. Using a law and political economy approach, this article argues that conceiving of data as capital that is coded by legal mechanisms allows new ways of imagining alternative distributions of the value it generates in the global economy today. The article maps some of the legal entitlements that shape the global data economy and its distributive effects, as well as proposals for alternatives. It concludes that analyses of the distributive effects of the global data economy ought to take into account the fundamental roles that both law and technology play in shaping those effects.