Julian Arato

• Professor (Assistant) at Brooklyn Law School

This Article argues that investment treaties subtly constrain how nations organize their internal systems of private law, including laws of property, contracts, corporations, and intellectual property. Problematically, the treaties do so on a one-size-fits-all basis, disregarding the wide variation in values reflected in these domestic legal instit...

This Article argues that multinational corporations have acquired the power to create primary rules of international law, at stark cost to the state’s regulatory autonomy. It is widely recognized that states have granted private business corporations significant capacities to act on the international stage, including the capacity to bear internatio...

Investment treaties tend to say nothing, or only very little, about the appropriate standard of review for arbitrating disputes between sovereign states and foreign investors. Most treaties do not address whether states should be afforded any deference in their own assessment of their treaty obligations. Neither do they specify the converse, that s...

This article presents an argument about the constitutional transformation of international organizations through the judicial interpretation of their constituent instruments. The organizations at issue are public institutions, established by international agreement and charged with the exercise of transnational governmental power. They are, on one...

The European Court of Human Rights is a constituted judicial body, established by international treaty among the member States of the Council of Europe. Yet it can hardly be described as a static creature of the Parties. The Court has undergone dramatic constitutional change since its inception, resulting in an organization significantly more auton...

This paper examines the competences of the UN Security Council under the “constitution” of the United Nations, focusing in particular on its recent innovations in legislation. Certain critics decry Council legislation as unconstitutional, null and void. Apologists retort that the Charter delegates broad power to the Council, and the impugned legisl...

Richard Gardiner’s Treaty Interpretation is a tremendous book, in terms of both substance and size. Yet in important ways the work is narrower than it might appear. Indeed its enormous merit is in large part due to the author’s narrow, disciplined approach – not in spite of it. As Gardiner readily acknowledges, the book is narrow in two critical wa...

On first reading the 2009 Lisbon case of the German Constitutional Court appears to hew quite closely to the Court’s reasoning in 1993, reviewing Germany’s accession to the Maastricht Treaty. Both cases declare that European integration must respect the inviolable and unamendable core of the German Constitution. (Specifically, in these cases, Artic...

This paper compares two different means of treaty interpretation by which a treaty or treaty provision may change over time: the interpretation and reinterpretation of a treaty on the basis of its evolutive character, and the (re)interpretation of a treaty on the basis of the subsequent practice of the parties. I contend that evolutive interpretati...