| Despite its scope and the striking powers it establishes, the international investment regime, as a whole, has drawn little more than restrained scholarly criticism. One smaller, still nascent body of scholarship has taken to forming systemic critiques of the regime, and it is to it that the author seeks to contribute. He argues that global distributive justice philosophy furnishes a critical, normative framework that is useful for systemic critique, though one that is undermined at present by a widely held and problematic theory of law. The author submits that critical legal theory should be incorporated into global justice philosophy, so as to remedy this problem. His is a double-sided argument: (1) investment law does raise a problem of global distributive justice, and (2) global justice theory's foundational concept of a 'basic structure' should be reimagined as something far more flexible and variable than it is generally taken to be. |
