Thursday, February 6, 2014

Workshop: International Investment Law and the Global Financial Architecture

For several years, the Frankfurt Investment Law Workshop has been a forum to discuss conceptual issues of international investment law. Previous workshops focused on International Investment Law and General International Law: From Clinical Isolation to Systemic Integration? (Nomos 2011), International Investment Law and Its Others (Nomos 2012), Preferential Trade and Investment Agreements: From Recalibration to Reintegration (Nomos 2013), and International Investment Law and Development: Friends or Foes?. This year’s workshop, which will take place March 14-15, will explore "International Investment Law and the Global Financial Architecture" The program is here. The workshop is organized by the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, the University of Glasgow, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Here's the idea:
Recent years have seen governments around the world re‐regulate (or consider re-regulating) markets in response to financial, banking, and sovereign debt crises. Re‐regulation is most clearly felt in the banking sector, but has also affected capital markets, rating agencies, and cross-border finance. All of this takes place in order to stabilize financial markets and to reduce the exposure of governments and central banks, but also of supranational and international institutions (such as the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, or the European Stability Mechanism) as lenders of last resort. The crises thus also involve serious concerns about public finance, monetary and fiscal policy, and sovereign insolvency. Accordingly, government activities as regulators of, but also participants in, global financial markets move center stage - and with it questions about the role of international investment law in the current reorganization of the global financial architecture. The 2014 Frankfurt Investment Law Workshop will explore this role through papers addressing the interaction between international investment law and financial market and banking regulation, free flow of capital, sovereign debt, and monetary policy.