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This article aims to demonstrate that in certain circumstances investors may legitimately expect protection from the host state against secondary sanctions imposed by a third state. Failure to meet those expectations by the host state may lead to a violation of the fair and equitable treatment (FET) found in various applicable investment treaties.

This article is based on a doctrinal analysis of various provisions contained in investment treaties, which guarantee the fair and equitable treatment of the foreign investor and its investment. It also involves an analysis of the EU’s Blocking Statute and how it influences the application of international (investment) law in the specific context of the research question.

Such a form of protection, however, is highly contingent on the existence of a domestic legislative framework that can create specific legitimate expectations. Applying this to the EU’s Blocking Statute (designed to protect EU operators from the extraterritorial application of a third state’s laws), foreign investors in the Union who are affected by secondary sanctions may only expect protection once the specific sanctions regimes are listed in the Annex to the Blocking Statute. Before the EU amends the Annex, no legitimate expectations that protection against secondary sanctions may be formed. Nonetheless, the complexity of the Blocking Statute, especially in terms of the protected interests, could have an impact on the formation of any expectations that would eventually be protected under international investment law.

This article assesses when, and how, the EU’s failure (or the failure of one Member State) to protect the foreign investor against secondary sanctions can amount to a violation of the FET in various applicable investment treaties. The main contribution of the present analysis is that it engages with a broadly under-researched area of international investment law – the extent to which it offers protection against economic sanctions. In addition, it zooms in on an instance of inaction that can amount to a violation of the host state’s obligations.

Before sending employees to the US, it is critical for foreign employers to understand the basic requirements of US wage and hour law to avoid unintentional but costly violations of that law. Many foreign companies are surprised to learn that the US workers they employ in the United States as well as their own workers who are sent to the United States for short periods are protected by the US wage and hour laws and must be paid in accordance with US law for workweeks in which the employee performs his or her work in the US or its territories. Unfortunately, many foreign companies do not learn about US wage and hour law until it is too late. This article explains the basic requirements of the US wage and hour law. Because most US wage and hour law requires an individualised case‐by‐case assessment of coverage and requirements, companies considering employing workers in or sending employees to the US are encouraged to consult with US employment law counsel about their specific situations.

Guided by Ericson’s counter-law analytic, the focus of this paper is how peace bonds erode traditional criminal law principles to govern uncertainty and provide applicants with a “freedom from fear” (Ericson, 2007a). Peace bonds permit the courts to impose a recognizance on anyone likely to cause harm or “personal injury” to a complainant. This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis to answer the question: how and to what extent are peace bonds a form of counter-law? Facilitated by the erosion of traditional criminal law principles and rationalized under a precautionary logic, proving that a complainant is fearful through a peace bond can result in the expansion of the state’s capacity to criminalize and conduct surveillance.

Laws geared toward regulating the employment relationship cling to traditional definitions of workplaces, neglecting the domain of the home and those who work there. Domestic workers, a population of largely immigrant women of color, have performed labor inside of New York City's homes for centuries and yet have consistently been denied coverage under labor law protections at both the state and federal level. This article traces out the exclusions of domestic workers historically and then turn to a particular piece of legislation – the 2010 New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights – which was the first law of its kind to regulate the household as a site of labor, therefore disrupting that long-standing pattern. However, the law falls short in granting basic worker protections to this particular group. Drawing from 52 in-depth interviews and analysis of legislative documents, The author argues that the problematics of the law can be understood by recognizing its embeddedness, or rather the broader political, legal, historical, and social ecology within which the law is embedded, which inhibited in a number of important ways the law's ability to work. This article shows how this plays out through the law obscuring the specificity of where this labor is performed – the home – as well as the demographic makeup of the immigrant women of color – the whom – performing it. Using the case study of domestic workers' recent inclusion into labor law coverage, this article urges a closer scrutiny of and attention to the changing nature of inequality, race, and gender present in employment relationships within the private household as well as found more generally throughout the low-wage sector.

Hybrid forms of international criminal justice have been lauded for combining the political and procedural legitimacy of international tribunals with increased attention to the local contexts where mass crimes occurred. This work critically examines the hybrid legal structure of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a novel post-conflict institution empowered to draw from both international and Sierra Leonean law. Although formally hybrid, the Court neglects domestic law in practice, suggesting that “hybridity” refers more to a rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimating its work than to its ontological status. By symbolically including and substantively excluding domestic law, the court's legal structure inadvertently resembles a colonial form of legal pluralism rather than a hybrid jurisdiction.

Corporate social responsibility describes the role that society expects of business organizations. Because it is difficult to see societal norms in one's own society, comparative law can help us increase the salience of those norms in our own community. Looking at how a set of business laws uniform across 16 West and Central African countries lives in one of the member states, Cameroon, we see that society expresses its norms not only when behavior tracks the positive law, but also, and very importantly, when it diverges from that law. After studying examples of divergence in the South, specifically in the African country Cameroon, the chapter turns to the North. Using the United States as the illustration, and focusing on the role of business entities, the chapter identifies ways of opening the discussion among all political constituents, even those outside the traditional business community.

Anatomy of a Murder, a beloved, highly influential, seemingly liberal 1959 classic law-film seems to appropriate some of the fading western genre’s features and social functions, intertwining the professional-plot western formula with a hero-lawyer variation on the classic western hero character, America’s 19th century archetypal True Man. In so doing, Anatomy revives the western genre’s honor code, embracing it into the hero-lawyer law-film. Concurrently, it accommodates the development of cinematic imagery of the emerging, professional elite groups, offering the public the notion of the professional super-lawyer, integrating legal professionalism with natural justice. In the course of establishing its Herculean lawyer, the film constitutes its female protagonist as a potential threat, subjecting her to a cinematic judgment of her sexual character and reinforcing the honor-based notion of woman’s sexual-guilt.

Giorgio Agamben has used the notion of the state of exception to describe the United States’ detention camps in Cuba. Agamben argues that the use of the state of exception in the U.S. can be traced back to President Lincoln's suspension of the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War. This paper suggests that this argument obscures more relevant legal and political precedents that can be found in U.S. territorial legal history. Moreover, while Agamben's argument obscures conceptual distinctions between a state of emergency and a state of exception, his argument also provides resources that can expose the limits of liberal interpretations of the relationship between the State, the citizen, and the law.

Through an analysis of texts and interviews with sanctuary providers from sanctuary incidents in Canada, this paper first details how sanctuary is made possible by pastoral and non-state sovereign powers. It then argues at least three stories of law are instantiated in sanctuary discourse. Law is at times arbitrary and unpredictable. In other instances, a ‘higher’ law authorizes sanctuary. Law is also a broader game in which lawyers are relied upon and sanctuary becomes a tactic to ‘win’. These legal narratives work together to constitute sanctuary and are instantiations of pastoral and sovereign powers at the level of the subject.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the safety value of implementing Asimov's Laws of Robotics as a future general framework that humans should obey. Asimov formulated laws to make explicit the safeguards of the robots in his stories: (1) A robot may not injure or harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. In Asimov's stories, it is always assumed that the laws are built into the robots to govern the behaviour of the robots. As his stories clearly demonstrate, the Laws can be ambiguous. Moreover, the laws are not very specific. General rules as a guide for robot behaviour may not be a very good method to achieve robot safety – if we expect the robots to follow them. But would it work for humans? In this chapter, we ask whether it would make as much, or more, sense to implement the laws in human legislation with the purpose of governing the behaviour of people or companies that develop, build, market or use AI, embodied in robots or in the form of software, now and in the future.