Introduction

My simple thesis, which I hope that this sophisticated audience will not find simplistic, is this: Customary international law governing the treatment of foreign investment has been reshaped to embody the principles of law found in more than two thousand concordant bilateral investment treaties. With the conclusion of such a cascade of parallel treaties, the international community has vaulted over the traditional divide between capital-exporting and capital-importing states and fashioned an essentially unified law of foreign investment. For some two hundred years, the ...