The Impact of Investment Treaty Law on Host States: Enabling Good Governance?

摘要

An ingenious author has burst the bubble surrounding a central yet unexamined assumption in international investment law. Some of the most prolific promoters of the regime - those whom can be called its 'norm entrepreneurs' -maintain that investment law has the beneficial effect of promoting standards of good governance associated with such things as transparency, predictability, and stability. These are the virtues Max Weber famously associated with the highest form of law, what he called formally rational law, that helped to spread capitalism throughout the occidental world. Weber, however, would have strenuously objected to the naive causal assumption that legal forms determine governance outcomes.