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‘[T]he “mainstream” of global governance has changed course’ and in so doing, might well have ‘outrun the standard tools of critical, progressive, and reform-minded international lawyers’, Fleur Johns wrote in 2019. It is especially the critical tools of ‘appeals to history, context, language [and] the grassroots’ in response to universalist planning that Johns sees absorbed in the turn to prototyping as a new ‘style’ of governance. In this article, we take on this observation and explore how the ‘lean start-up mentality’ that Johns described has taken hold of tech-based climate governance. We base our reflections on the ‘Tech for Our Planet’ challenge that took place over 2021 and was showcased at the UNFCCC COP26 in Glasgow. While a turn ‘from planning to prototypes’ is observable, we question how exactly this ‘change of course’ affects the high modernist style of global governance and its critique by international lawyers. The ‘digital solutions for climate challenges’ that were showcased in Glasgow are indeed based on localized experiments with data science, thereby seemingly overcoming high modernist impulses towards universalist ideals. Yet, these experimental prototypes are developed with the ambition of being replicable and scaled up, to become a stack of tools deployable in any given scenario. This form of scaling up neither breaks with modernist aspirations based on technologically-mediated replicability—of moving the same logic inscribed in code to different sites and contexts—nor with a modernist understanding of knowledge as universal in its application. In our analysis, the determining feature is then not so much a matter of planning or prototyping in ideal type forms, but of replicability of knowledge production and scalability of technological know-how that underpin both planning and prototyping. Prototyping in the start-up space does not depart from, but rather reinscribes, a modernist representation of the human subject that forces its epistemological lens onto a world of nonhuman objects amenable to governance. Critical international lawyers’ toolkits must therefore be reconfigured with a focus on a governance style of disembodied knowledge production that runs through both planning and prototyping.

The current non-compliance with United Nations (UN) and World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements protecting transnational public goods, military aggression among WTO members, violent suppression of human and democratic rights, global health pandemics, climate change, ocean pollution, overfishing, and other biodiversity losses reflects ‘governance failures’ (e.g. to limit ‘market failures’) and ‘constitutional failures’ (e.g. to protect human and democratic rights and the sustainable development goals). The geopolitical rivalries among totalitarian governments and democracies render constitutional UN and WTO reforms unlikely. They entail ‘regulatory competition’ (e.g. among neoliberalism, state capitalism, and ordo-liberal constitutionalism) and plurilateral responses aimed at limiting abuses of power (like collective countermeasures against Russia’s illegal wars and war crimes) and at protecting transnational public goods (like plurilateral ‘climate change mitigation clubs’, appeal arbitration among WTO members, regional human rights and security agreements). The power politics disrupting the UN and WTO legal systems is bound to promote regionalization of economic law, re-globalization of supply chains, and geopolitical rivalries resulting from conflicting value priorities and neglect for the human rights underlying the sustainable development goals.

Among the many legacies left by Rudolf Bernhardt, the significance heattached to the doctrine of the ‘living instrument’ is crucial. Accordingly, theEuropean Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) must be interpreted asevolving and dynamic – as a ‘living’ organism. In this article, I reflect on whatit would mean to move from a ‘living constitution’ to a ‘constitution of theliving’. To answer this question, I consider what constitutes life itself – whichforms of life currently merit legal consideration and care. The argumentunfolds in three steps, each tracing a different way in which the protection oflife is being reconfigured against the backdrop of ecological and climatechange. The first part of the article is devoted to the ‘liberal response’ to ecological threats posed to life, which calls for a recognition of a self-standinghuman right to a healthy environment to better protect human life. Thesecond part focuses on the ‘critical liberal response’, which advocates grantingrights to nature to safeguard nonhuman life. Finally, I explore how theprotection of life appears in critical posthumanist, new materialist, and decolonialunderstandings of liveability. My objective here is not to propose a legalreform of the institutional functioning of the ECHR, but to speculate abouthow this ‘living constitution’ could ‘constitute the living’ differently. If themetaphor of life acts as a ruling device in the interpretation of the ECHR,only particular life-forms get protected, while others are eclipsed. I thereforethink with Bernhardt’s invitation to consider the ‘living’ nature of the ECHRto reconceptualise the protection of life that animates human rights theoryand practice today.

This article provides ethnographic insights into the making of the latest UN-backed instrument for transnational environmental law and governance: the Global Pact for the Environment (GPE). It narrates the rise and fall of a contemporary policy project designed to unify and strengthen international environmental law. The story starts in 2015 on the premises of a Parisian legal think tank and ends in May 2019 at the headquarters of the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, where states ultimately decided not to adopt the GPE as a legally binding instrument but opted to prepare a political declaration to be presented in 2022 at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UN Conference on the Human Environment. The time between 2015 and 2019 is divided in two periods. From 2015 to 2017, the GPE was imagined, drafted, and promoted by a group of non-state actors mainly constituted by legal academics. From 2017 to 2019, the GPE was introduced in the UN machinery and turned into a state-oriented policy process. Based on original interview material and an unexplored archive of primary sources, the article traces the multiplicity of actants enrolled in the GPE, the interests that held them together, and the institutional ties they built for the project to materialize. It draws on actor-network theory's model of translation—through problematization, interessement, enrolment, and mobilization—to reassemble the bonds between human and nonhuman actants in the making of the “global,” the “pact,” and the “environment.” The account sheds light on the informal processes and the relational and agential dynamics at play in this laboratory of transnational environmental lawmaking, thereby illuminating and questioning the politics of policy-entrepreneurship and consensus-building—the tenuous and fragile modes of existence that mark contemporary international law.

Reforms of international trade and investment law and institutions are hampered by conflicting economic paradigms. For instance, utilitarian Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism (e.g. promoting self-regulatory market forces privileging the homo economicus), constitutional European ordo-liberalism (e.g. protecting multilevel, constitutional rights and judicial remedies of European Union citizens), and authoritarian state-capitalism (e.g. protecting totalitarian power monopolies of the communist party in China) pursue different legal and institutional designs of trade and investment agreements. Globalization and its transformation of national into transnational public goods (PG s) require extending constitutional and institutional economics to multilevel governance of transnational PG s in order to enhance the wealth of nations. Maintaining the worldwide legal and dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – and interpreting its regional and national exception clauses broadly in order to reconcile diverse, national and regional institutions of economic integration and of ‘embedded liberalism’ – remains in the interest of all WTO member states.

To keep the Earth habitable, we need a new ecology (oikos-logia). Against the background of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which some humans and their extractive economies disrupted the...

First published online: May 30, 2020 As the most frequent and most successful user of the dispute settlement system of the WTO, the US has welcomed judicial clarifications by WTO dispute settlement bodies whenever they confirmed legal claims of the US. Yet, the Trump administration increasingly rejects judicial findings against the US trade restrictions as violating the WTO prohibitions of "add(ing) to or diminish(ing) the rights and obligations provided in the covered agreements." This contribution criticizes the illegal US 'blocking' of the WTO Appellate Body and the underlying, hegemonic nationalism and protectionist interest group politics. It suggests that reasonable and responsible citizens benefitting from the WTO trading, legal and dispute settlement systems must resist illegal power politics, for instance, by supporting a WTO Adjudication@me.too "enlightenment campaign" pressuring democratic institutions and governments to protect rule of law and judicial remedies in international trade as prescribed by parliaments when they approved the WTO Agreement.

This contribution uses the examples of Great Britain’s withdrawal from the EU (Brexit) and US withdrawal from multilateral trade and environmental agreements for exploring political, economic, environmental, social, and legal reasons driving the backlash against economic integration agreements. In both examples, populist battle-cries for ‘taking back control’ and for lowering regulatory standards were followed by governmental attempts at evading parliamentary control over executive foreign policy powers to violate, or withdraw from, multilateral agreements. Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism, President Trump’s mercantilist power politics, authoritarian state-capitalism (e.g. in China), and European ordo-liberalism reflect systemic divergences that may justify broad interpretations of WTO ‘exceptions’ (e.g. for WTO trade remedies and climate change mitigation). Europe’s multilevel, democratic constitutionalism protecting ‘social market economies’ was comparatively more effective in limiting protectionism and carbon emissions inside Europe’s common market. The EU’s ‘new green deal’ for a carbon-neutral ‘green economy’ was made possible by stronger, social, and democratic support based on ‘constitutional interpretations’ of Europe’s ordo-liberalism assisting adversely affected workers, producers, traders, investors, and other citizens to adjust economic and environmental activities to climate change mitigation. EU leadership for WTO-consistent climate change rules requires ‘greening embedded liberalism’ by interpreting the WTO ‘sustainable development’ objectives in conformity with the 2015 Paris Agreement, the UN ‘sustainable development goals’, and human rights (e.g. as legal basis for climate change litigation in Europe).

This article rethinks the doctrines of responsibility and protection in international environmental law in light of notions of response-abilities and care in more-than-human worlds. Inspired by the intersecting strands of new materialist, relational and posthuman literatures, and informed by critiques of them by decolonial, indigenous and black scholars, the analysis works with onto-epistemologies of becoming that posit an inseparability of being, knowing and acting with(in) the Anthropocene/s. Through the notion of response-abilities of care, the article reconfigures how the destructive and the restorative relations between humans and nonhumans could be construed beyond a narrow understanding of state sovereignty, territorial jurisdiction, liberal human-centred notions of individuated agency and the strict causal nexus between victim and perpetrator. The analysis concludes by reflecting on how law could remain open to emergent, unfolding and contingent potentialities of entangled human-nonhuman relations, and questions law’s capacity to recognize and respond to the agency and alterity of nonhumans. These configurations exceed the schema of responsibility and protection that organizes even international environmental law’s most progressive theories and practices, such as granting ‘rights to nature’.

This article explores what the emerging paradigm of ‘Earth System Law’ suggests in terms of reconfigurations of the Earth, its subjects and the law. Which representations of the Earth and of its subjects does Earth System Law think with? And which human-nonhuman relations do these systemic reconceptualizations translate? While innovative in many regards when contraposed to international environmental law, Earth System Law's central novelty lies in its ‘systems-oriented ontology’. Yet, it is precisely this underpinning that deserves, I argue, more critical attention. While Earth System Law's rendering of the Earth system seems to embrace an ‘autopoietic’ understanding of how life-making and life-sustaining processes are enacted, its proposed functioning of a planetary Earth System Law and the systems approach that underlies it remain elusive. This article unpacks these tenets by suggesting that, instead of looking at the functioning of the Earth through autopoietic lenses, a ‘sympoietic’ view should be preferred to make sense of how life emerges and contingently unfolds on Earth, and leave space for collective modes of being, thinking and acting in the Anthropocene.

Since 2017, the United States (US) and other World Trade Organization (WTO) members have been violating their legal duties and democratic mandates given by national parliaments to maintain the WTO Appellate Body (AB) as legally prescribed in Article 17 of the WTO Dispute Understanding (DSU). Article 17 defines the AB as being ‘composed of seven persons’, with vacancies being ‘filled as they arise’. Sections 2 and 3 explain why none of the reasons offered by the US for its blocking of the (re)appointment of AB candidates – on grounds unrelated to the personal qualifications of the candidates – can justify the illegal disruptions of the WTO legal and dispute settlement system. EU trade diplomats must exercise leadership using the existing legal powers and duties of the WTO Ministerial Conference and General Council under Article IX WTO – if necessary, based on ‘a majority of the votes cast’ – to complete the WTO selection procedures for filling AB vacancies and protect the AB as legally defined in Article 17 DSU. Sections 4 and 5 explain why the competition, social policy, and rule-of-law principles underlying European ‘ordo-liberalism’ offer coherent strategies for overcoming the WTO governance crises by limiting hegemonic abuses of both US neo-liberalism and Chinese state-capitalism.

In times when intricate concerns for social and ecological justice are becoming ever more prominent in global environmental discourses, conflicts between minorities’ rights and environmental policies present delicate trade-offs that demand ingenious balancing by regional human rights courts. Such conflicts tend to boil down to oppositions between ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’ practices set against ‘modern’ ideals, thereby displaying and performing important normative, epistemic and political implications. To legitimise and strengthen their cases, parties resort to expert interventions. While the involvement of experts speaking on behalf of minorities can bolster the communities’ legal protection, the shared assumptions, rhetorical style and professional sensibility of intervening experts can trigger unintended consequences for the identity and (self-)perception of the peoples they represent. The case-law analysis presented here instantiates how networks of experts with shared institutional ties intervene before courts, use specific discursive strategies to further their representatives’ claims and reinforce the normative salience of their interventions through cross-jurisdictional and cross-cultural referencing. Drawing on insights from discourse analysis, (legal) anthropology and cultural geography, the article develops a critique of the politics of expert-based approaches to conflict management in regional human rights settings.

This contribution begins with an overview of changing paradigms of international investment regulation, adjudication, and multilevel governance of public goods. It then discusses legal methodology challenges of applying human rights in investment adjudication and the “entry points” for invoking human rights in investment arbitration. The overview of case law on invocation of human rights by investors, home and host states, third parties, and adjudicators suggests that procedural and substantive human rights and related “systemic interpretations” play marginal roles in investment adjudication outside the European Union.

This article focuses on China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a potential cause of trade,investment, financial, maritime, energy trade and intellectual property disputes. In so doingthis contribution discusses the increasing “ systemic rivalry ” among authoritarian, neo-liberal and ordo-liberal conceptions of international economic law and the resulting legal problems in the settlement of BRI disputes inside the EU countries, whose courts may notrecognize arbitration awards by Chinese arbitration institutions and may hold Chineseinvestors accountable for disregard for human and labor rights in their BRI investmentinside the EU countries.

Arbitration and adjudication aim at protecting rule-of-law, which was a life-long concern for Prof. Giorgio Bernini. The United Nations (UN) have defined ‘rule of law at national and international levels’ as ‘a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with internationally recognized human rights’. Such ‘rule of law’ has emerged in worldwide trade and investment law only since the 1990s with the ‘judicialization’ of GATT/WTO law and investor-state arbitration (ISA). Both the World Trade Organization (WTO) adjudication and ISA are today challenged: The power-oriented blockage of Appellate Body (AB) nominations by the USA has rendered the WTO AB dysfunctional; it re-introduced power-politics into the WTO dispute settlement system, limited by voluntary ‘interim appellate arbitration’. ISA is rejected by some developing countries and inside the European Union as a threat to democratic constitutionalism. This contribution discusses these dialectic developments, i.e. ISA reforms aimed at strengthening ‘public law adjudication’ inside and beyond the European Union; the WTO appellate court system being transformed into voluntary arbitration in response to alleged ‘judicial overreach’; and multilevel judicial cooperation inside the EU, where the German Constitutional Court has - for the first time since the beginning of European economic integration in the 1950s - refused complying with a judgment of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) on the ground that the CJEU and the European Central Bank exceeded their limited powers ‘arbitrarily’ due to their insufficient ‘proportionality justification’ of encroachment on national economic and fiscal policy powers. How can rule-of-law, constitutional and ‘deliberative democracy’ and judicial comity be protected in multilevel, judicial cooperation among national and international courts?

Claims of ‘judicial overreach’ currently disrupt the World Trade Organization (WTO), investor-state arbitration and multilevel judicial governance in the European Union. Section I discusses the postwar evolution from the neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ to the ordo-liberal ‘Geneva consensus’ promoting global human rights, multilateral trading systems and transnational rule-of-law based on UN/WTO law. The neoliberal US assault on WTO law and adjudication (discussed in Section II) and China’s totalitarian state-capitalism (Section III) challenge multilateral treaty systems and related adjudication protecting global public goods. The claims of ‘judicial overreach’ in multilateral trade, investment and European adjudication (discussed in Section IV) reveal systemic conflicts among regulatory and judicial approaches. Section V concludes that European Union law requires defending the ‘constitutional functions’ of ordo-liberal integration law through EU leadership for plurilateral WTO reforms; economic, environmental and human rights litigation in Europe confirm the need for participatory governance in multilevel legal and judicial protection of the UN/WTO sustainable development goals.

ObjectiveAuricular stimulation (AS) is a promising method in the treatment of situational anxiety. Expressive writing (EW) is an established psychological method, which reduces test anxiety and improves exam results. The aim of this crossover trial was to compare AS with EW, and with the no intervention (NI) condition, for treatment of exam anxiety.MethodsHealthy medical students underwent 3 comparable anatomy exams with an interval of one month, either performing EW, receiving AS or NI prior to the exam; the order of interventions was randomized. AS was applied using indwelling fixed needles bilaterally at the areas innervated mostly by the auricular branch of the vagal nerve on the day before the exam. Anxiety level, measured using State-Trait-Anxiety Inventory (STAI) before and after the interventions and immediately before exam, was the primary outcome. Quality of night sleep, blood pressure, heart rate and activity of salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) were analyzed across 3 conditions.ResultsAll 37 included participants completed the study. Anxiety level (STAI) decreased immediately after AS in comparison with baseline (P = 0.02) and remained lower in comparison with that after EW and NI (PConclusionAuricular stimulation, but not expressive writing, reduced exam anxiety and improved quality of sleep in medical students. These changes might be due to reduced activity of the sympathetic nervous system.

Evidence is limited regarding whether periodontal treatment improves hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) among people with prediabetes and periodontal disease, and it is unknown whether improvement of metabolic status persists >3 mo. In an exploratory post hoc analysis of the multicenter randomized controlled trial “Antibiotika und Parodontitis” (Antibiotics and Periodontitis)—a prospective, stratified, double-blind study—we assessed whether nonsurgical periodontal treatment with or without an adjunctive systemic antibiotic treatment affects HbA1c and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) levels among periodontitis patients with normal HbA1c (≤5.7%, n = 218), prediabetes (5.7% < HbA1c < 6.5%, n = 101), or unknown diabetes (HbA1c ≥ 6.5%, n = 8) over a period of 27.5 mo. Nonsurgical periodontal treatment reduced mean pocket probing depth by >1 mm in both groups. In the normal HbA1c group, HbA1c values remained unchanged at 5.0% (95% CI, 4.9% to 6.1%) during the observation period. Among periodontitis patients with prediabetes, HbA1c decreased from 5.9% (95% CI, 5.9% to 6.0%) to 5.4% (95% CI, 5.3% to 5.5%) at 15.5 mo and increased to 5.6% (95% CI, 5.4% to 5.7%) after 27.5 mo. At 27.5 mo, 46% of periodontitis patients with prediabetes had normal HbA1c levels, whereas 47.9% remained unchanged and 6.3% progressed to diabetes. Median hsCRP values were reduced in the normal HbA1c and prediabetes groups from 1.2 and 1.4 mg/L to 0.7 and 0.7 mg/L, respectively. Nonsurgical periodontal treatment may improve blood glucose values among periodontitis patients with prediabetes (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00707369).

Published online: September 1, 2018 In their recent article titled, Pluralism or Cosmopolitanism? Reflections on Petersmann's International Economic Law Constitutionalism in the Context of China, Tao Li and Zuoli Jiang have criticized the alleged 'paradox' that my publications "stress 'legal pluralism' on the one hand, while calling for a cosmopolitan conception of IEL on the other hand." This short comment aims not only at clarifying conceptual misunderstandings due to our different "constitutional law perspectives," but also explaining why China should embrace a 'dialogical' rather than "exclusive legal perspectivism" by continuing to implement its international legal obligations (e.g., under the UN/WTO law) in good faith and assuming more leadership for the global public good of the rules-based world trading system, with due respect for its underlying 'legal pluralism' and often indeterminate 'basic principles.' My Chinese critics' emphasis on the reality of authoritarian Chinese "top-down conceptions" of law and governance neglects China's obligations under international law and China's compliance with the WTO, investment and commercial adjudication."

The EU free trade agreements (FTAs) with Canada and the USA aim at protecting transnational public goods - like a rules-based, transatlantic market - that could be progressively extended to other European and North-American FTA member states and serve as a model for reforming also worldwide trade rules and governance institutions. As explained by democratic and cosmopolitan republicanism and 'law and economics', international law and governance can protect public goods more effectively and legitimately if citizens are empowered as 'democratic principals' and republican 'constituent powers' to hold multilevel governance institutions legally, democratically and judicially accountable for their frequent governance failures. The Lisbon Treaty established a 'cosmopolitan foreign policy constitution' requiring 'protection of its citizens', 'strict observance of international law' and rights-based market regulations also in the EU's external relations (cf. Arts 3, 21 TEU). This contribution criticizes the EU policies of disempowering citizens in FTAs with constitutional democracies and undermining their fundamental rights and judicial remedies. Without stronger accountability to its citizens, the EU cannot address its crises of legitimacy and disregard for rule of law.

Globalization and the recognition of human rights and constitutionalism by all UN member states entail that also international courts increasingly interpret their judicial mandates and multilateral treaties in conformity with 'constitutional principles' as multilevel governance of transnational public goods (PGs) constraining intergovernmental power politics through judicial protection of transnational rule of law for the benefit of citizens. US President Trump, the 'Brexit', and an increasing number of non-democratic rulers (e.g. in China, Russia, and Turkey) challenge multilateral treaty systems, international adjudication and 'cosmopolitan rights' by ‘populist protectionism’ prioritizing ‘bilateral deals’. This contribution uses the US blockage of the WTO Appellate Body system for illustrating the 'republican argument' that transnational PGs cannot be protected without judicial remedies, rule of law and democratic governance. Adversely affected governments, citizens and courts of justice must hold power politics more accountable so as to protect PGs for the benefit of citizens and their constitutional rights. WTO members should use their power of majority voting for authoritative interpretations of WTO law supporting ‘judicial administration of justice’ in multilevel governance of the world trading system. Multilevel judicial control of trade regulation legitimizes ‘member-driven governance’ by protecting rule of law as approved by parliaments for the benefit of citizens, their equal rights and social welfare.

This overview of 'methodology problems' in international economic law (IEL) and adjudication defines 'legal methodology' as the 'best way' for identifying the 'sources' of law, legitimate authority, the methods of legal interpretation, law-making and adjudication, the 'primary rules of conduct' and 'secondary rules of recognition, change and adjudication', the relationships between 'legal positivism', 'natural law' and 'social theories of law', and the 'dual nature' of modern legal systems. It discusses the methodological challenges resulting from the often incomplete, fragmented and under-theorized nature of multilevel, public and private regulation of transnational movements of goods, services, persons, capital and related payments. Governments and lawyers disagree on how to define the legitimate functions of IEL as an instrument of social change, the 'legal system' of IEL, and how to transform the 'law in the books' into socially effective 'law in action' so as to protect the rights and welfare of citizens more effectively. Democratic, republican and cosmopolitan constitutionalism suggest that the five competing conceptions of IEL as (1) international law among states, (2) private international law (e.g. commercial, investment and 'conflicts law'), (3) multilevel economic regulation (e.g. based on 'law and economics'), (4) global administrative law and (5) multilevel constitutional law (e.g. in European common market and monetary regulation) need to be integrated; they must protect democratic, republican and cosmopolitan rights of citizens who-as 'constituent powers', 'democratic principals' and main economic actors-must hold multilevel governance institutions and their limited, delegated powers legally, democratically and judicially more accountable so as to limit 'market failures' as well as 'governance failures' more effectively. Arguably, the universal recognition of human and constitutional rights of citizens requires cosmopolitan reforms of IEL and stronger judicial remedies for protection of transnational rule of law.

This chapter discusses problems of legal fragmentation of international investment law and human rights law and related legal methodology questions regarding person-oriented principles of justice (such as human rights and ‘proportionality balancing’) in contrast to state-centered ‘principles of justice’ (like international state responsibility). The chapter builds on a comprehensive survey of publicly available investor-states disputes in which human rights were invoked by the parties to dispute (investor, host state and arbitrators ex officio) or third party interveners. The assessment of these awards in Part 2 of this chapter suggests that arbitral tribunals are more open towards human rights as due process rights and as principles of procedural fairness and balancing than towards integrating human rights as an authoritative legal regime consisting of legally enforceable entitlements. The only exception to this general trend remains the right to property. However, the assessment generally reveals a lack of systematic methodology as to how to respond to human rights argumentation. Part 3 traces the legal reasons behind these observations by looking into the entry points for human rights and obstacles for integration as they emerge from the texts of BITs and IIAs. This part demonstrates the possibilities that already exist for arbitrators to take into account human rights, such as jurisdiction clauses, applicable law clauses, definitions of ‘investments,’ the customary rules of treaty interpretation, preambles of BITs, relevant protection standards and rules on awarding damage compensation. The conclusion suggests that the shortcomings are not an inevitable result of textual limitations, as alternative outcomes of ISDS disputes are legally possible and justifiable. In the absence of any development of a clear methodology, textual adjustment might thus not counter fragmentation. Systemic reform might be necessary to ensure transparent, coherent and balanced approaches to human rights argumentation.

Published: 30 January 2018 The ‘environment’ is a substantively indeterminate concept that has borne different meanings throughout time and translated different visions of the (legal) relationship between Man and Nature. Over the past centuries, the normative concern for environmental protection emanated from distinct legal, cultural and socio-economic narratives. In providing a genealogy of these multiple and overlapping frames, this article not only sharpens our historical understanding of the legal nexus between two proliferating regimes in international law (environmental law and human rights law) but also critically engages with how environmental protection was progressively translated as an anthropocentric conceptual and operational legal framework. Like Narcissus, humans have been obnibulated by their own interests when thinking about environmental protection. The anthropocentric focus has led environmental law to gradually align and intertwine with human rights, resulting in a synergistic conceptualization of their interactions. Through this prism, environmental protection automatically reinforces human rights. This synergistic mantra has allowed environmental protection to gain momentum by associating it with a grander moral scheme. The focus on synergies, however, overshadowed the existence of conflicts inherent to the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

Since 2017, the United States (US) and other World Trade Organization (WTO) members violate their legal duties and democratic mandates given by national parliaments to maintain the WTO Appellate Body (AB) as legally prescribed in Article 17 of the WTO Dispute Understanding (DSU), i.e. as being ‘composed of seven persons’, with vacancies being ‘filled as they arise’. This contribution argues that none of the reasons offered by the US for its blocking of the (re)appointment of AB candidates - on grounds unrelated to the personal qualifications of the candidates - can legally justify its disruptions of the WTO legal and dispute settlement system. Also the European Union (EU) has offered no convincing justification of its failure to protect ‘strict observance of international law’ in it external relations, as required by Article 3 of the Lisbon Treaty on European Union (TEU) and by Article IX:1 WTO Agreement (‘where a decision cannot be arrived at by consensus, the matter at issue shall be decided by voting’). The 2018 ‘Concept Paper’ prepared by the EU Commission on ‘WTO modernization’ indicates no strategy for the obvious problem that the EU objective of ‘preserving and deepening the rules-based multilateral system’, including ‘more effective and transparent dispute settlement including the Appellate Body’, is inconsistent with the US strategies underlying US blocking of the AB jurisdiction by preventing the appointment of AB judges, a strategy which was previously applied by the US for blocking third-party adjudication under Chapter 20 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Trade diplomats have no democratic mandate for disrupting the AB jurisdiction by illegally reducing the number of AB members to one single judge by December 2019 and, thereby, undermining the WTO legal and dispute settlement system. EU trade diplomats must exercise leadership for using the existing legal powers and duties of the WTO Ministerial Conference and General Council under Article IX:1 WTO – if necessary, based on ‘a majority of the votes cast’ - to initiate and complete the WTO selection procedures for filling AB vacancies and protect the AB as legally defined in Article 17 DSU. Article IX.2 could be used for authoritative interpretations ‘taken by a three-fourths majority of the Members’ confirming the collective duties of WTO members to fill AB vacancies in case of illegal blocking of AB nominations. WTO law foresees similar majority decisions for the appointment of the WTO Director-General; such majority decisions are necessary for preventing illegal de facto amendments of the WTO legal system, and do not set a precedent for future WTO majority voting on discretionary, political issues, which most WTO diplomats reject as a ‘nuclear option’. As suggested by European ordo-liberalism, citizens and democratic institutions must hold trade politicians democratically and legally more accountable for complying with their legislative mandates to implement and modernize, but not to destroy WTO law and dispute settlement.

Democracy and constitutionalism are communitarian methodologies. My arguments for limiting market failures, governance failures, and related injustices in the global division of labour by using the universal recognition of human rights for reinterpreting the ‘international law of states’ as ‘multilevel governance of public goods’ protecting citizens—and by learning from republican, democratic, and cosmopolitan constitutionalism—have never pleaded for ‘radical individualism’ and ‘rights-absolutism’. This response to my Chinese critics uses 10 methodology and research questions for challenging their claim that Chinese traditions of Confucian ethics offer a sufficient substitute for the lack of democratic constitutionalism and of effective human rights law inside the People’s Republic of China. In view of the dangers of totalitarianism, Asian lawyers should participate in ‘JIEL debates’ on how Confucian ethics and communitarian legal traditions in many Asian countries can be reconciled with stronger protection of human rights in international economic law.

Evaluations of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) among Canada and the European Union (EU) and of the ongoing EU–US negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) depend on their legal, economic, and political methodologies for multilevel governance of public goods (PGs) like a transatlantic market. In contrast to the American and European post-war leadership for democratic governance of PGs (as recalled in Section I), the CETA fails to adequately protect democratic governance, rights of citizens, and judicial remedies in transatlantic market regulation (Section II). TTIP negotiators likewise prioritize economic and utilitarian group interests in order to limit opposition to a successful completion of TTIP; this risks undermining ‘republican governance’ and rights of citizens as limitations on the longstanding governance failures in the Transatlantic Partnership since the 1990s (Section III). Rather than complying with the EU Treaty requirements to base external free trade agreements (FTAs) on the ‘constitutional values’ that successfully govern market regulation and competition throughout Europe, trade negotiators abuse their ‘executive monopoly’ over transatlantic negotiations so as to limit their own legal, democratic, and judicial accountability vis-a-vis citizens. Civil society and parliaments should resist such ‘disconnected Westphalian governance’ and insist that international treaties with ‘legislative functions’ for protecting transnational PGs must be governed democratically and protect transnational rights and remedies of citizens so as to enable the ‘democratic principals’ to hold governance agents and their limited ‘constituted powers’ more accountable for the ubiquity of ‘market failures’ and ‘governance failures’ that continue to distort transatlantic relations, rule of law, and consumer welfare.

Objective Auricular acupuncture (AA) is a promising alternative treatment for situational anxiety. The aim of this pilot investigation was to test the acceptability and feasibility of AA as a treatment for preoperative anxiety (PA) in preparation for a subsequent randomised controlled trial. Methods AA was offered for treatment of PA to female patients who were scheduled for ambulatory gynaecological surgery. In patients who agreed, indwelling fixed needles were applied bilaterally at the points MA-IC1, MA-TF1, MA-SC, MA-AH7 and MA-T the day before surgery. Patients who declined AA but agreed to be examined constituted the control group (no intervention). State anxiety (primary outcome) was measured using the State-Trait-Anxiety Inventory (STAI) before AA (time I), the evening before surgery (time II) and immediately before surgery (time III). Anxiety was measured with a 100 mm visual analogue scale (VAS-100); heart rate, blood pressure and serum cortisol were also quantified. Results Data from 62 patients (32 with AA and 30 with no intervention) were analysed. Whereas preoperative anxiety was reduced after AA the evening before surgery (PConclusions AA was acceptable and feasible as a treatment for preoperative anxiety. The results were used for the sample size calculation of a subsequent randomised controlled clinical trial. Trial Registration Number NCT02656966; Results.

In the Collected Courses of the Xiamen Academy of International Law Hans van Loon, Former Secretary-General of The Hague Conference of Private International Law, Prof. Bimal N. Patel, Director of Gujarat National Law University, India, and Prof. Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann of the European University Institute in Florence, provide insightful, perspicacious and concise analysis of recent developments in international law .

The ‘constitutional failures’ ushering in World Wars I and II and the emergence of post-war ‘multilevel constitutionalism’ in Europe suggest that also UN/WTO law can effectively protect international public goods only if UN/WTO law are interpreted and protected for the benefit of citizens in conformity with the human rights and other ‘principles of justice’ recognized by all UN member states. This paper discusses recent publications by Philip Allott on ‘international constitutionalism’ and argues that the necessary transformation of the prevailing conceptions of ‘international law among sovereign states’ into a ‘multilevel constitutional law of humanity’ requires extending ‘multilevel constitutionalism’ to UN/WTO governance of public goods with due respect for ‘constitutional pluralism’ protecting individual and democratic diversity, subsidiarity and ‘institutional experimentation’.

International economic law (IEL) continues to evolve through dialectic processes of unilateral, bilateral, regional and worldwide regulation aimed at protecting cosmopolitan rights and transnational rule of law in mutually beneficial economic cooperation among citizens in a globalizing economy (section 1). The more transnational protection of cosmopolitan rights (e.g., human rights, trading, investor and social rights) depends on multilevel cooperation among national and international courts, the stronger becomes the need for justifying “multilevel judicial governance” by conceptions of “cosmopolitan” and “constitutional justice” rather than only by “Westphalian justice” and “commutative justice”, as reciprocally agreed in treaties among States (section 2). “Fragmentation” of “IEL among States” through multilevel economic regulation and adjudication (e.g., inside free trade areas and economic communities) is a necessary strategy for reforming international law for the benefit of citizens. In order to remain legitimate and reconcile the rational self-interests of citizens with their reasonable common interests, investment arbitration must remain embedded into multilevel human rights law and respect for legitimate “constitutional pluralism” protecting cosmopolitan rights, transnational “participatory” and “deliberative democracy” and rule of law through “consistent interpretations” and “judicial comity” among national and international courts of justice (section 3).

This contribution argues that the perennial negotiations on adjustments of the law of the WTO (e.g. by means of the Doha Round negotiations) and of UN law (e.g. adjustments of the IMF quota and voting system, UN climate change regulations) reflect systemic problems of multilevel governance of international public goods (PGs) that call for reviewing traditional regulatory approaches at national and international levels of governance (as discussed in Sections II and III) so as to better respond to the ‘collective action problems’ of multilevel governance of international PGs (as discussed in Section IV). The concluding Section V draws policy lessons from the WTO agreements adopted at the WTO Ministerial Conference at Bali. Rather than lamenting about ‘fragmentation’ of UN and WTO law, bilateral, regional and other plurilateral agreements can be justified as necessary instruments for reforming international law for the benefit of citizens; the ‘consistent interpretation’—and ‘judicial comity’—requirements of national and international legal systems call for interpreting such agreements in conformity with the UN and WTO legal obligations of contracting parties as integral parts of multilevel governance of ‘aggregate PGs’ demanded by citizens.