Balancing and Sovereignty in International Law: Reviewing Convergences and Divergences in International Investment Law and Trade Law

This study aims to advance the discussion of the relationship between international investment law and trade law. International lawyers have explored this issue by analysing the convergence and divergence of the treaty text and the practice. This study, however, moving away from the focus on the convergence/divergence dichotomy. It argues that the what is elementary to international law is how the States and adjudicators share the understanding of the governance of state practices and how the shared understandings shape the boundaries of sovereignty written in the treaty and interpreted by the practice. The argument leads the study to demonstrate how the change of political ideologies concerning the role of government on the market can shed light on the development of international investment law and trade law. This study offers an original interpretative approach to review the parallel between international investment law and WTO law in terms of balancing. It integrates the analysis of balancing into the discussion of international law to suggest the boundaries of sovereignty gradually shifting toward the reservation and expansion, and so is one of the comparative studies to attempt to suggest the unity of the two regimes. As a result, these analyses get a detailed discussion of a variety of a legal principle reflecting the interaction between the States and adjudicators in competing contexts.