The purpose of a pre-inquest review hearing is explored in this chapter.

This chapter analyses the policies and practices related to resolving investor–state disputes through ISDS. In this area, three broad themes emerged from our data. First, there are practices of forming the defence strategy for specific investment arbitrations and handling ISDS proceedings. The main issue is whether to engage lawyers from private practice and, if so, to what extent. Second, we discuss the matter of coordination and communication between various governance actors during ISDS proceedings. The third issue is that of dispute prevention. Given the stakes, risks, and challenges resulting from ISDS disputes, many governance actors dealing with IIAs realise that dispute prevention is crucial in internalising the IIA disciplines. This section focuses on various training and educative programmes for bureaucrats that were designed, proposed, or implemented to increase the knowledge about and awareness of IIAs within the broad sphere of national governance. We end with a discussion on the blurring of the public–private divide through the engagement of private expertise in the service of the public when defending ISDS cases.

How can improving the collection, sharing, and analysis of data make the civil justice system more accountable to other government institutions, participants in the justice system, and the public at large? We tackle this question from three angles. First we show how accountability can create opportunities for civil justice reform. Drawing on work in other social spheres on large datasets, we identify three lines of research that court data could inform: the extent that structural racism and other biases shape processes and outcomes; the impact of lack of representation on litigants’ experiences and outcomes; and the antecedents and consequences of court involvement for poor people. A second focus is the obstacles that prevent us from increasing our store of knowledge about civil justice problems. These obstacles include: the lack of good data, legal barriers to obtaining data, and real and perceived institutional risks to sharing data. Finally, we report on our efforts to design and build a civil justice data commons (CJDC) addressing these barriers in order to provide fast and frictionless access for policy research as well as operational insights for courts and civil justice institutions to improve equity and service delivery.

Reparations have forced international(-ised) criminal courts to move beyond their comfort zones and engage with the diverse socio-political and cultural contexts before them. At the core of this process is the courts’ engagement with survivors of mass atrocities, who were largely absent during the negotiations. The first cases before both the ICC and the ECCC were the testing ground for their novel victim participation schemes. This chapter shows that targeting and representational practices have shaped participation, influencing who receives reparations and how these reparations are conceived. The contours of the groups of victims who receive reparations are constructed and continuously contested through practices of juridification and litigation. Moreover, ‘participation’ is carried out through representatives who translate and discipline the multitude of survivor demands for the purposes of courts’ legal proceedings. This chapter focuses on the two groups most involved in such ‘reparational’ practices: NGO ‘intermediaries’, and victims’ legal representatives.

Some things should not be for sale. One’s body or one’s children, to take the most glaring examples. But, arguably, more trivial things like the family heirloom or a citizen’s vote should also not be bought and sold. Theorists differ both about the membership of this class (what things should not be for sale) and about the grounds for membership in it (why they should not be bought and sold). Yet there is virtual unanimity that it is not an empty set. Human beings, if nothing else, should not be sold on the market, not even by themselves (selling oneself into slavery).

In recent years, an expansive literature has been produced analyzing the moral limits of markets, focusing on the question just presented: what kinds of goods should not be bought and sold on the market.