Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law Volume 17

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MR. MICHAEL NOLAN: So, I’m a longtime friend of this conference, for a lot of reasons. But one of them is I think the format is just terrific. I think it’s a great idea that we have people who are ambitious and not yet lazy doing tons of work to pull together these interesting topics and then making other people look better, because we have a lot of fodder to discuss. And I think we’ve seen that this morning. And hopefully, you’re going to see that this afternoon. I think it’s just a great format. We’re going to hear from our writers, Allan, and Anika who have really put together a great paper in a very ambitious outline that I commend to you. 

What I want to do is introduce this topic a little bit more thoroughly, than sometimes topics are introduced, because I think this this one may require it. This case that we’re going to be discussing, the Sultan of Sulu case, so I like to think of it because it makes it seem especially exotic, is on everybody’s radar screen to some extent, because it is the Sultan of Sulu, and involves Borneo and things like that would kind of grasp your attention. And then there’s a 14.92 billion award in it that grasps your attention too. But this isn’t really like, Achmea and how it is playing out in national courts in the Federal Circuit in the United States, and that sort of stuff. It really causes people to be engaged, and to follow this topic, I think you need to be brought in a little bit to some of these facts, I’ll try to do some of that. The first thing, though, that I commend all of you to recognize, is this is an important topic for a conference like this, for some reasons that Todd alluded to, in his introduction. We are at a time, our last panelist put it as kind of de-globalization, we’re thinking about whether we’re in an environment of de-globalization, Todd presented our collective enterprise, the investment treaty enterprise, is fundamentally about, as he put it, a certain kind of freedom. Protecting a certain kind of freedom, which is really very fundamentally being challenged at this time, in popular political and social discourse. That’s part of the reason this is an important case, because this case is not really an investment treaty case, in the sense that it does not arise out of a bilateral investment treaty or a multilateral investment treaty in the kind that we typically deal with in our little part of this trade.