The normative asymmetry between the rights and obligations of investors and host states under investment treaties has been a key reason for the treaties' common characterization as "unbalanced". While initially a description of a justified treaty design, imbalance has since become a central component of the legitimacy challenges to the investment treaty regime: a normative demand of the treaties' realignment. Identifying the imbalance critiques of investment treaties as fairness-based critiques concerning the distributive implications of investment treaties, the article considers to what extent including provisions on investor conduct in investment treaties may address the concerns about potential unfairness in the allocation of rights
and obligations under these treaties. In particular, the article argues that understanding the imbalance critiques as concerns of distributive justice enables the assessment of investment treaty design innovations and the alternative ways in which these instruments could be structured to produce different distributive outcomes.

The business and human rights (BHR) framework has regularly been considered the superior legal regime of corporate accountability for business-related human rights abuses, which must be both protected from and incorporated into investment treaties. However, investment treaties have surpassed the BHR framework in an important respect: certain investment treaties impose strict international legal obligations, including human rights-related obligations, directly on investors, thereby going beyond the normatively ambiguous corporate responsibility to respect. Investment treaty reform initiatives, including those seeking to align investment treaties with the BHR agenda, should therefore take care to avoid inadvertently undoing this advance towards investors’ legal accountability.

This article explores transformations in international law with respect to collective nonstate entities, challenging the mainstream view that international law stipulates rights and obligations directly binding on such entities only on an exceptional basis. Through the example of the U.N. Charter’s regime for international peace and security, this article demonstrates the normative change within international law to directly address rights and obligations to collective nonstate entities, without the interposition of any state. The article argues that the normative inclusion of collective nonstate entities within binding international law may be conceptualized and explained as involving the operation of a “functional threshold.” Specifically, only the functionally critical collective nonstate entities, i.e., entities perceived as indispensable for the performance of the legal regime’s function, have acquired direct rights and obligations under international law.

The scope of states’ power to regulate in the public interest, within the normative context of an applicable investment protection treaty, has been the central issue of recent investor-state arbitration cases. Against the backdrop of a debate on the legitimacy and acceptable parameters of international investment protection regimes, many arbitral tribunals have become more sensitive to host states’ public policy objectives and more willing to balance investor protection with other interests. States themselves have sought to intervene in the practice of investment arbitration on the level of applicable treaty norms, as the wording of specific treaty provisions has been a key factor in case outcomes. This practice has received only limited attention in scholarly literature and commentary to date. By analyzing the body of recent investment treaties, this article outlines the treaty design innovations through which states have sought to provide a firm legal basis for a more balanced understanding of investment protection and a more nuanced arbitral approach: (i) specific protections of host states’ regulatory autonomy; and (ii) imposition of binding obligations on investors. The provisions protecting host states’ regulatory autonomy explicitly enshrine the states’ power to regulate and through a variety of tools limit opportunities for broad interpretations of investment guarantees conferred through the investment treaty. The stipulation of investor obligations represents a true paradigm-shifting intervention, which does away with the normative asymmetry of investment treaties but presents a number of novel issues in the process. Together, the treaty innovations characterize the advent of a new, more balanced generation of investment treaties.

This paper discusses the understanding and application of the doctrine of State immunity in the courts of the Czech Republic. In 2008, the Czech Supreme Court reversed its previous conceptualization of State immunity as absolute and introduced a restrictive approach. In doing so, the Court formulated the concept of so-called "functional State immunity", which comparatively sets Czech practice apart from the practice of other States, and could therefore constitute the very contribution of Czech courts to the development of the contemporary doctrine of State immunity in international law. The paper analyzes this concept and the Czech approach more generally through a comparison with other jurisdictions, as well as with jurisprudence of international courts and relevant international instruments. On balance, the Czech State immunity regime is still largely underdeveloped, and many issues remain open for judicial elaboration in future cases.