Introduction

Your comments on the Pakistan BIT seminar prompted me to send you some of my opinions. I think it is extremely important to distinguish between the views and deliberations of international lawyers in a seminar or in an arbitral tribunal from their political acceptability or otherwise in any given country. If we could agree that democracy is the least bad version of government, then international law has scant legitimacy on any city street. A population can vote away a government it does not like. It cannot do that with an international legal or ...