A Tale of Two Treaties: A Study of NAFTA and the USMCA's Investor-State Dispute Settlement Mechanisms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is a standard component of most multilateral free-trade and investment regimes as a way of encouraging cross-border investment. However, the concept has long been mired in controversy, primarily due to its alleged transgression against national sovereignty and domestic regulatory powers. As ideas such as free trade and globalization come under increasing scrutiny in the post-Great Recession era, these controversies have not only rendered ISDS itself politically vulnerable, but also came to jeopardize the success and survival of free-trade and investment regimes that commonly contain ISDS provisions. A salient example of the increasing political risks carried by ISDS is the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), during which ISDS reform became a major point of contention between Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. negotiators. This Comment first presents an overview and case studies regarding the existing ISDS mechanism contained within NAFTA Chapter 11, before moving onto an examination of its counterpart in the Chapter 14 of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). While USMCA Chapter 14 is narrower in scope compared to its NAFTA predecessor, it strikes a much-needed balance between reducing the political risks that have long plagued the traditional ISDS model and encouraging cross-border investment from the United States into Mexico, the latter being a developing country which uses ISDS to attract and reassure foreign investors. In sum, while questions regarding further revisions and potential alternatives remain, the USMCA's approach towards ISDS may well prove to be a viable template for the next generation of ISDS provisions.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
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".