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    Pacta Sunt Servanda and State Promises to Foreign Investors Before Bilateral Investment Treaties: Myth and Reality

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    In their 1959 proposal to build a new international legal order founded upon principles of human dignity, Professors Myres McDougal and Harold Lasswell admonished international legal scholars to continuously reappraise the suitability and necessity of existing international legal institutions, taking due notice of the myths on which current arrangements are based and justified.\u27 The aim of this Article is to take McDougal and Lasswell\u27s admonition seriously in analyzing one of the persistent myths that serves to explain and to justify bilateral investment treaties ( BIT s) that form the backbone of the modern system of international investment law. The author’s aim is simply to establish that developing countries enjoy significant flexibility to exit the BIT system-if they come to the conclusion that BITs are, on net, undesirable-without harming their ability to make binding commitments to investors on a case-by-case basis through investment contracts, supported by international arbitration. In Part I, the author first briefly describes the modern BIT regime. The author then summarize and discuss the most important extant theoretical study of BITs and the source of the myth challenged here. Part II presents the mythic account of BITs. Part III analyzes the extensive jurisprudence of international arbitral tribunals in the pre-BIT era, which the author defines as the period prior to the 1990s. This jurisprudence demonstrates that international tribunals reliably expressed support in the abstract for the principle of pacta sunt servanda, and that they reliably awarded investors meaningful compensation for violations of the principle. Part IV discusses why the permanent sovereignty movement failed to make state promises unenforceable. Part V summarizes the Article\u27s main points and responds to four potential objections. Part VI concludes

    A Matter of Good Form: The (Downsized) Hague Judgments Convention and Conditions of Formal Validity for the Enforcement of Forum Selection Agreements

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    Can the Hague Judgments Convention be saved through radical downsizing? It has been more than ten years since the Hague Conference on Private International Law (Hague Conference) first officially began exploring the possibility of drafting a global convention on jurisdiction and the enforcement of foreign judgments in civil and commercial matters. (1) It has been more than four years since the Conference presented its preliminary draft convention, (2) itself modeled largely on the European Community\u27s 1968 Brussels Convention on Jurisdiction and the Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (Brussels I). (3) However, this preliminary draft convention was rejected as unacceptable by the American delegation, (4) and a subsequent interim text (5) indicated that Hague Conference delegates remained far from consensus on a wide range of issues. (6

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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