Jusletter IT

More than 3'000 international investment agreements (IIAs) have been concluded by 2015 and virtually every country is a signatory. What makes these treaties special is their enforcement mechanism: private investors can sue states directly before international arbitration potentially winning multi-million dollar awards. Given its size and atomized nature, however, practitioners struggle to effectively navigate the IIA universe. To reduce investment law's complexity, this paper introduces a range of computational approaches relying on state-of-the-art technology. Implemented as a web-based tool, these approaches allow researchers, policy makers and litigators to assess similarities and differences between agreements quickly and intuitively helping them to navigate the investment treaty universe.