Only a handful of awards were rendered in the first year of my immersion in investment treaty arbitration. This pace left time for even an active practitioner to study and annotate each new award. With the dramatic increase in investment treaty arbitrations over the past 15 years, however, the pace of new awards is such that practitioners struggle to keep up. Many useful treatises on investment treaty arbitration have been written. The relentless rate of change in the field rapidly leaves them out of date.
The Investment Treaty Arbitration Review fills, in this environment, an essential function. Updated every year, it provides a current perspective on a quickly evolving topic. Organized by topic rather than by jurisdiction, it allows readers rapidly to access not only the most recent developments on a given subject but also the debate that led to, and provides context for, those developments.
This first edition represents an important contribution to the field of investment treaty arbitration, and a useful new tool in the kits of practitioners. I thank the contributors for their fine work in developing the content for this volume.