This Note for the Yearbook of Consumer Law first updates on proposals to reform Australia's consumer product safety regulation regime. Discussions have largely stalled, despite legitimacy and efficiency concerns evident from a related review of its main standard-setting body. By contrast,...

A decade ago, leading arbitration institutions and practitioners responded to growing concerns about burgeoning costs and delays in international commercial arbitration ("ICA") partly through some considerable changes to Arbitration Rules. Nowadays, however, disquiet has re-emerged especially...

The paper is based on my contributions to the East Asia Forum blog (and my partially overlapping "Japanese Law and the Asia Pacific" blog) drawing mainly on developments from the end of 2008 through to mid-2009. Many topics are important not only within Australia and Japan, but also potentially...

This paper outlines the historical evolution of Australia's foreign direct investment (FDI) regulation generally, under national law and more recently bilateral investment treaties (BITs) or investment chapters of free trade agreements (FTAs). This sets the stage for closer analysis of the...

As in some developing countries and more recently some developed countries worldwide and in the Asian region, Australia has faced significant internal opposition and public debate especially over treaty-based investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). As outlined in Part II(1), concerns have...

This case has been a flashpoint for recent debates over investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). For Australia, subjected to its first ISDS claim, the case triggered extensive public discussion over whether to continue including ISDS clauses in future bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and...

This paper provides a detailed (100 page) and up-to-date introduction to international commercial and investment treaty arbitration in Australia. Some of the material will be incorporated into a chapter in the forthcoming second edition of Simon Greenberg, Christopher Kee and J. Romesh...

Indonesia recently announced that it would review its 67 bilateral investment treaties (BITs). Shortly beforehand, it had unsuccessfully challenged the jurisdiction of an ICSID arbitral tribunal in a claim for expropriation and other violations brought by the Australian subsidiary of a UK coal...

This paper outlines our collaborative research project for 2014-16, aimed at evaluating the economic and legal risks associated with the Australian Government's recent approach to investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), and broader implications for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and...