The Admissibility of Amicus Curiae Briefs by NGOs in Investor-States Arbitration: The Precedent Set by the Methanex Case in the Context of NAFTA Chapter 11 Proceedings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This case note analyzes a recent award (Methanex Corporation v. United States of America) decided by an arbitral tribunal established pursuant to NAFTA Chapter 11 on investors-States arbitration. The Arbitral Tribunal decided that it had the power under Article 15(1) of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules and under NAFTA Chapter 11 to accept amicus curiae briefs submitted by several Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Weighting all relevant factors, the Tribunal also decided that it would use its discretion to accept such briefs, but that it would make a final decision on whether or not to receive each of them only at a later stage of the arbitral proceedings. It is the first time that an arbitral tribunal accepted in principle amicus curiae briefs by NGOs in the context of investor-State arbitration disputes. This note examines in detail the reasoning of the Tribunal. It finally concludes on the likely impact of this award on NAFTA Chapter 11 arbitration and other Investor-States dispute settlement mechanisms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.051 | 0.082 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.030 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".