The Articles section in this issue begins with a contribution by Anna Hood, Madelaine Chiam and Monique Cormier, which brings attention to international law open letter writing. They analyse the open letters that were written in the first three months after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022 and the Israel-Gaza conflict in 2023. They conceive of such open letter writing as a particular type of international legal practice serving three main purposes of advocacy, solidarity and public education.
The second article, by Taylor St John, Malcolm Langford, Yuliya Chernykh, Øyvind Stiansen, Tarald Gulseth Berge, and Sergio Puig, problematizes the common assumption of full compliance in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Evidence shows a wide array of post-award behaviours of states. These behaviours, the authors argue, suggest that the ISDS compliance process can better be conceptualized as bargaining rather than states fulfilling their obligations under the ‘fixed standards’ set by the awards.
