Investment Law and the Right to Regulate Public Health and Environmental Protection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the tension between investment law protections and a state’s right to regulate public health and environmental protection. International investment agreements (IIAs) provide strong protections for foreign investors, often limiting host states’ regulatory freedoms. This dynamic can create challenges when states seek to implement policies for public welfare that may impact foreign investments. The study examines case law, such as Philip Morris v. Uruguay and Vattenfall v. Germany, to highlight conflicts between investor rights and regulatory measures. Through a review of recent treaties, including the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the article identifies emerging mechanisms like explicit right-to-regulate clauses, carve-outs, and interpretive guidelines designed to balance investment protection with the public interest. The results indicate that some protections are provided by new treaty provisions, but interpretive flexibility and a lack of automaticity in procedural aspects of arbitration can create as-yet unresolved challenges. It recommends that investment law reforms go further and focus on placing the public interest at the heart of investment law, establishing an architecture supportive of sustainable development, and enabling states to respond to pressing health and environmental problems without running the risk of investor claims.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".