This volume argues that international human rights law has made a positive contribution to the realization of human rights in much of the world. Although governments sometimes ratify human rights treaties, gambling that they will experience little pressure to comply with them, this is not typically the case. Focusing on rights stakeholders rather than the United Nations or state pressure, Beth Simmons demonstrates through a combination of statistical analyses and case studies that the ratification of treaties leads to better rights practices on average. Simmons argues that international human rights law should get more practical and rhetorical support from the international community as a supplement to broader efforts to address conflict, development, and democratization.

/pdf/mobilizing-for-human-rights-international-law-in-domestic-1kn9xhxi9f.pdf

Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics

Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic progress and human rights. Coercion theorists point to powerful nation-states, and international financial institutions, that threaten sanctions or promise aid in return for fiscal conservatism, free trade, etc. Competition theorists argue that countries compete to attract investment and to sell exports by lowering the cost of doing business, reducing constraints on investment, or reducing tariff barriers in the hope of reciprocity. Learning theorists suggest that countries learn from their own experiences and, as well, from the policy experiments of their peers. We review the large body of research from sociologists and political scientists, as well as the growing body of work from economists and psychologists, pointing to the diverse mechanisms that are theorized and to promising avenues for distinguishing among causal mechanisms.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2281983_code2071501.pdf?abstractid=2281983&type=2

The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition or Learning?

Over the past forty-five years, bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have become the most important international legal mechanism for the encouragement and governance of foreign direct investment. The proliferation of BITs during the past two decades in particular has been phenomenal. These intergovernmental treaties typically grant extensive rights to foreign investors, including protection of contractual rights and the right to international arbitration in the event of an investment dispute. How can we explain the widespread adoption of BITs? We argue that the spread of BITs is driven by international competition among potential host countries—typically developing countries—for foreign direct investment. We propose a set of hypotheses that derive from such an explanation and develop a set of empirical tests that rely on network measures of economic competition as well as more indirect evidence of competitive pressures on the host to sign BITs. The evidence suggests that potential hosts are more likely to sign BITs when their competitors have done so. We find some evidence that coercion and learning play a role, but less support for cultural explanations based on emulation. Our main finding is that the diffusion of BITs is associated with competitive economic pressures among developing countries to capture a share of foreign investment. We are agnostic at this point about the benefits of this competition for development.For useful comments on earlier drafts of this article, we thank Bill Bernhard, Bear Braumoeller, Frank Dobbin, Robert Franzese, Jeffry Frieden, Geoffrey Garrett, Tom Ginsburg, Jude Hays, Lisa Martin, Bob Pahre, Mark Ramsayer, Steven Ratner, Susan Rose-Ackerman, and John Sides. For research assistance, we thank Elizabeth Burden, Raechel Groom, and Alexander Noonan.

/pdf/competing-for-capital-the-diffusion-of-bilateral-investment-3s5mns2yj2.pdf

Competing for Capital: The Diffusion of Bilateral Investment Treaties, 1960-2000

Political scientists, sociologists, and economists have all sought to ana- lyze the spread of economic and political liberalism across countries in recent decades+ This article documents this diffusion of liberal policies and politics and proposes four distinct theories to explain how the prior choices of some countries and inter- national actors affect the subsequent behavior of others: coercion, competition, learn- ing, and emulation+ These theories are explored empirically in the symposium articles that follow+ The goal of the symposium is to bring quite different and often isolated schools of thought into contact and communication with one another, and to define common metrics by which we can judge the utility of the contending approaches to diffusion across different policy domains+

/pdf/introduction-the-international-diffusion-of-liberalism-j0407lw02p.pdf

Introduction: The International Diffusion of Liberalism

/pdf/the-global-diffusion-of-public-policies-social-construction-shbgia8tot.pdf

The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition, or Learning?

The globalization of business activity is rightfully celebrated as one of the triumphs of the second half of the twentieth century The benefits stemming from the globalization of commerce are substantial, but international transactions also bring with them important challenges for the world's legal systems Traditionally, national governments could focus on their domestic economies without undue attention to

/pdf/international-bankruptcy-in-defense-of-universalism-4ujjlpkm2e.pdf

International Bankruptcy: In Defense of Universalism

International antitrust issues have become important in current debates regarding international trade and international regulation. This Article addresses one of the central questions about international antitrust - the appropriate forum for negotiations. The Article argues that the combination of domestic antitrust policy and international trade makes a substantive multilateral agreement unlikely unless transfers are made from states that gain from such a deal to those that lose. The Article advocates bringing the issue of international antitrust within the WTO because that forum is the best suited to accommodate such transfers. The experience of efforts to negotiate an agreement in intellectual property (IP) is offered as a demonstration of the advantages offered by the WTO. Like antitrust, the realities of IP made an agreement without transfers virtually impossible. In the case of IP, the difficulty was that developing countries had little to gain from such an agreement. Once negotiations were brought within the WTO, however, an agreement was reached because developing countries were granted trade concessions in exchange for accepting the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPs) agreement. Like international IP, international antitrust needs to be negotiated in a forum that allows for transfers, making the WTO the best available forum.

/pdf/international-antitrust-and-the-wto-the-lesson-from-4p3heg57wh.pdf

International Antitrust and the WTO: The Lesson from Intellectual Property

This paper analyzes the effects of the legal rules governing transnational bankruptcies. We compare a regime of territoriality' -- in which assets are adjudicated by the jurisdiction in which they are located at the time of the bankruptcy -- with a regime of universality are adjudicated in a single jurisdiction. Territoriality is shown to generate a distortion in investment patterns that might lead to an inefficient allocation of capital across countries. We also analyze who gains and who loses from territoriality, explain why countries engage in it even though it reduces global welfare, and identify what can be done to achieve universality.

An Economic Analysis of Transnational Bankruptcies

There is a growing and misinformed sense in some quarters that the United States and other countries have engaged (and continue to engage) in delegations to international institution that involve a significant threat to domestic sovereignty. Concerns about such delegations come from academics (John Yoo: "Novel forms of international cooperation increasingly call for the transfer of rulemaking authority to international organizations"), prominent politicians (Bob Barr: "Nary a thought is given when international organizations, like the UN, attempt to enforce their myopic vision of a one-world government upon America, while trumping our Constitution in the process. Moreover, many in our own government willfully or ignorantly cede constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms to the international community;" Jesse Helms: "The American people see the UN aspiring to establish itself as the central authority of a new international order of global laws and global government."); and senior government officials (John Bolton: "For virtually every area of public policy, there is a Globalist proposal, consistent with the overall objective of reducing individual nation-state autonomy, particularly that of the United States"). In our view the perspective evidenced by the above quotes is almost wholly a myth. But it is a myth that persists and continues to attract attention. This Essay seeks to bring forward a more realistic and accurate view of international institutions and engagement. We demonstrate that meaningful delegations of sovereignty are extremely rare and even when they do exist they are carefully cabined. Decision-making authority in all areas remains firmly in the hands of national governments.

/pdf/the-myth-of-international-delegation-oj6dqen5p1.pdf

The Myth of International Delegation

This paper examines the use of the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism by states. In particular, we are interested in understanding what causes disputes to move from the negotiation stage to the panel stage. Standard models of dispute settlement within a domestic context usually focus on the role of informational asymmetries on the probability of settlement. Although informational issues may be relevant at the WTO as well, we test an alternative, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, hypothesis. When states negotiate over a dispute at the WTO, their negotiations are typically focused on the specific source of the dispute. This inevitably constrains their ability to reach an agreement because transfer payments between the parties are more difficult than transfers in the form of, for example, cash. Furthermore, to the extent that the only transfers considered are those that can be made by manipulating the disputed policy variables, certain disputes will be particularly difficult to settle prior to the panel stage. When the subject matter of the dispute has an all-or-nothing character and leaves little room for compromise, as might be true of health and safety regulations, for example, the parties' ability to reach an agreement through the use of transfers is restricted. Settlement through negotiation may be even more difficult when governments cannot easily fashion side-payments to compensate for a major indivisible concession. In contrast, if the subject matter of the dispute permits greater flexibility, such as the setting of a tariff level, the parties can more easily structure appropriate transfer payments by adjusting that variable.

To Settle or Empanel? An Empirical Analysis of Litigation and Settlement at the WTO

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