Seminar with David Schneiderman

Investment Arbitration as International Bureaucracy?

(Draft Chapter from A Sociology of International Investment Law: Themes from Max Weber

by David Schneiderman)

Max Weber characterized bureaucratic power as one of the most ‘fateful’ forces in modern life.  Indispensable to the rise of formally rational law of the modern Western state was a staff of well-trained and independent bureaucrats who administer and enforce it. Because Weber did not distinguish sharply between the figures who enforced the administration of justice and other officials, judicial machinery was assimilated into his discussion of bureaucracy. This robust understanding of administration provides ground upon which to consider investment arbitration as a form of bureaucratic justice understood in Weberian terms. I take up this question by, first, summarizing Weber’s worry about bureaucracy and, second, by examining scholarship that considers ways in which the authority of international adjudicators, operating in a wide variety of settings, can be controlled. Finally, in the third part, I consider how investment arbitration fits into the machinery for international justice for foreign investors, serving at the apex of investment law’s bureaucracy. The aim is to portray investment arbitration as not merely performing bureaucratic functions but also political ones.

Speaker bio

David Schneiderman is Professor of Law and Political Science (by courtesy) at the University of Toronto where he teaches Canadian and comparative constitutional law and international investment law. He is the author of over 80 articles and book chapters and, in addition, the author or editor of fourteen books. Among them are Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy's Promise (Cambridge UP 2008), Resisting Economic Globalization: Critical Theory and International Investment Law (Palgrave 2013), Investment Law’s Alibis: Colonialism, Imperialism, Debt and Development (Cambridge UP 2022), Rethinking Investment Law (co-edited with Gus Van Harten) (Oxford UP 2023), and Constitutional Review and International Investment Law: Deference or Defiance? (Oxford UP 2024).

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