Publications

On 24 February 1603, three Dutch ships belonging to the then-newly formed Dutch East India Company anchored off the Strait of Singapore. Later that night, a large Portuguese carrack, Santa Catarina, anchored next to them. It was a gigantic U‑shaped boat carrying nearly a thousand people (majority slaves), 1200 bales of Chinese raw silk, several hundred ounces of musk, and a large amount of Ming porcelain. Losing no time, the…

The recent decision of the Hague District Court in Friends of the Earth v Royal Dutch Shell marks the first instance where a duty was cast on a corporation to reduce its carbon emissions. Consequently, this decision is significant in the efforts to create a regime of corporate emissions liability. Little attention, however, has been spent on how this decision treats legal entities. In holding Royal Dutch Shell responsible for Shell…

One of India’s many fiscal challenges this budget season relates almost entirely to how the law is read on retrospective taxation. What hangs in the balance is over INR 50,000 crore or more that may be owed to the exchequer by Cairn Energy Plc and Vodafone BV — both international disputes having resulted in recent arbitral awards that have ruled against India on the issue (the ​“Retrospective Tax Awards”). There is much, however, that…

Arbitrating corruption issues tends to highlight what has been called the paradox of arbitration, i.e., that arbitration must remain tethered to the very public authorities it seeks freedom from. And while friction is perhaps inevitable with public illegalities being addressed in what are essentially private procedures, it is also a useful litmus test of arbitration’s fitness to deal with rapidly expanding frontiers. This paper…

This paper compares capital flow regulation across the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund, Bilateral Investment Treaties (specifically the US Model BIT 2012), and the GATT and the GATS agreements administered by the World Trade Organization. Revisiting these regulatory frameworks is significant in the context of increased global liquidity following the extensive use of unconventional monetary policies in recent…