Professor David Schneiderman delivers Chan Sek Keong Professorial Lecture in Public Law

On 29 August 2024, Professor David Schneiderman delivered a lecture titled “Of Constitutional Interest? Comparative Constitutional Encounters with International Investment Law ” at the Wee Chong Jin Moot Court located in NUS Law’s Bukit Timah Campus.

How have apex courts responded to shrinking policy space as a consequence of international treaties that protect the contract, property, and due process rights of foreign investors? Investment treaties have prompted allegations that they are not constitutionally compliant, because they violate either constitutional procedures or constitutional rights. Are apex courts interested in such arguments in defence of constitutional standards or do they simply get out of the way?

Drawing upon a new empirical study, the lecture catalogued how apex courts in some locales have responded to these challenges, both in the Global North and in selected Global South courts. If high courts in the North have found a way of smoothing a path to constitutional compatibility, those in the South have offered a greater spectrum of responses to investment law’s constraints, ranging from deference to modest defiance. The lecture concluded with a normative argument about why courts are duty bound to closely scrutinise treaties for their constitutional compatibility, rather than simply yielding, as some advocate, to the exigencies of international economic law.

About Professor David Schneiderman 

David Schneiderman is Professor of Law and Political Science (courtesy) at the University of Toronto where he teaches courses on Canadian, US and comparative constitutional law and international investment law. He has been visiting Professor of Law at Gothenburg University, University of Stockholm, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Georgetown University, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. He is the author of over 80 articles and book chapters and, in addition, the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Constitutionalizing Economic Globalization: Investment Rules and Democracy’s Promise (Cambridge UP 2008), Resisting Economic Globalization: Critical Theory and International Investment Law (Palgrave 2013), Red, White and Kind of Blue? The Conservatives and the Americanization of Canadian Constitutional Culture (U Toronto, 2015) and Investment Law’s Alibis: Colonialism, Imperialism, Debt and Development (Cambridge UP, 2022). His newest book is entitled Constitutional Review and International Investment Law: Deference or Defiance? (Oxford UP, 2024).