A timely response to the pressing issue of public pension reform, The Public Pension Crisis explores the complex relationship between contract law and government pensions, specifically focusing on the Contract Clause and related state Pension Clauses. Analyzing over a decade of litigation, the book highlights the evolving role of pension contracts in constitutional law and examines more than 70 landmark cases to establish a clear, principled framework for determining when pension benefits qualify as contractual obligations. T. Leigh Anenson presents a unified theory to consistently treat public and private pensions, balancing the interests of employees’ earned benefits with the financial challenges facing governments. Combining legal scholarship with practical policy insights, Anenson not only provides a much-needed legal perspective on pension reform but also calls for a systematic approach to addressing the retirement security crisis.

Terrorism event databases provide systematized descriptive information about terrorist attacks from unclassified, open sources where the attack is the unit of analysis. Because terrorism is a type of behavior that is difficult to study by more traditional means (e.g., perpetrator interviews or police reports), event databases have come to fill an important niche. Contemporary efforts to build event databases can be traced back to the late 1960s . Thus far the most comprehensive event databases have been the RAND Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism and the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (MIPT-RDWTI), the International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events (ITERATE), the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the terrorism data collected by the US State Department, and the World-Wide Incidents Tracking System (WITS). Given the often-clandestine nature of terrorism, event data have important weaknesses, most notably media inaccuracies; conflicting information or false, multiple or no claims of responsibility; government censorship and disinformation; and a lack of systematic empirical validation. Nevertheless, event databases on terrorism can be justified in part because most terrorists seek publicity. Likely future improvements include better coverage of domestic terrorism, more extensive automated coding, enhanced geo-spatial coding, and better linkages to related databases.

Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms are complementary to court proceedings and have gained wide acceptance. The main advantage of ADR techniques is that litigants are not bound by the technicalities of ordinary court procedures. Society, the state and parties to a dispute are equally under an obligation to resolve the dispute before it disturbs the peace in the family, business community and, ultimately, humanity as a whole, because a civilised society implies the application of the rule of law and principles of natural justice. In fact, arbitration, one such ADR mechanism, has a long tradition in many countries, and India too has an age-old tradition of settlement of disputes through arbitration and conciliation. In ancient rural India, panchayats were a forum for the settlement of disputes. In villages, disputes were not to be taken to the courts of law; instead, they were referred to the panchayats consisting of village elders who commanded great respect. The village panchayats were so called because each consisted of five (panch) elders, who used to preside over civil, criminal and family disputes; these five elders were referred to as panch parameswar (equating them to the gods). This system worked successfully in the villages and was independent of state authority and control. The concept of parties settling their disputes in a binding manner by referring them to a person or persons of their choice or private tribunals was thus well known in ancient and medieval India. Appeals were also often made against the decisions of such persons or tribunals to the courts of judges appointed by the king and, ultimately, to the king himself.

The rapid digitalization of the economy has led to the proliferation of companies with primarily digital presences and global operations. This transformation has prompted governments worldwide to impose digital taxes on technology companies, sparking debates about the compatibility of such measures with international investment law. The introduction of digital taxes represents a significant departure from traditional territorial based tax principles, creating legal uncertainty and potentially discriminatory effects. And while the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework aims to establish a multilateral solution to digital taxation, its implementation poses challenges, including potential investor claims. Against this backdrop, this chapter explores the implications of digital taxation on foreign investors’ rights under international investment agreements, by examining four key questions: whether digital assets can qualify as protected “investments” under investment treaties; whether digital taxes violate national treatment obligations by disproportionately burdening foreign investors; whether such measures breach the right to fair and equitable treatment, including legal stability; and whether they amount to unlawful indirect expropriation by neutralizing digital assets as investments. By addressing these issues, this chapter highlights the evolving interplay between digital taxation and international investment law, emphasizing the need for balanced solutions that mitigate conflicts while fostering legal certainty in the digital economy.

A timely response to the pressing issue of public pension reform, The Public Pension Crisis explores the complex relationship between contract law and government pensions, specifically focusing on the Contract Clause and related state Pension Clauses. Analyzing over a decade of litigation, the book highlights the evolving role of pension contracts in constitutional law and examines more than 70 landmark cases to establish a clear, principled framework for determining when pension benefits qualify as contractual obligations. T. Leigh Anenson presents a unified theory to consistently treat public and private pensions, balancing the interests of employees’ earned benefits with the financial challenges facing governments. Combining legal scholarship with practical policy insights, Anenson not only provides a much-needed legal perspective on pension reform but also calls for a systematic approach to addressing the retirement security crisis.

As business transactions and the global economy become increasingly digitalized, international investment disputes will deal with novel assets in new boundary-defiant contexts. Indeed, jurisdictional arguments and objections will likely require arbitral tribunals to confront with the uneasy task of delineating the ‘localization’ of investments in digital economy assets such as cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, and data-related investments. However, given that even more traditional assets have raised a variety of problems relating to territorial nexus and localization, the authors believe that the digital economy emphasizes what are essentially differences in degree rather than in kind. This chapter discusses the complexities that arise in considering the idiosyncrasies of investments in digital economy assets within a traditional territorially defined jurisdictional framework. First, the authors present some of those new digital economy assets and canvass several typical cross-border challenges inherent in international investment arbitration. Second, they question how traditional objections to jurisdiction ratione personae and jurisdiction ratione materiae might be employed when the investments in question relate to those digital developments. Third, the chapter raises questions about states’ jurisdiction to prescribe, and ponders the potential effects for purposes of jurisdiction of states asserting their authority to prescribe over investments or investors outside their territory.

This chapter surveys the empirical evidence on the effect of terror on social cohesion. We report on attitudinal changes towards the minority group to which terrorists are perceived to belong and by that group towards integration. We also discuss evidence of increased discrimination in labor and housing markets and reduced assimilation efforts in the wake of major terror attacks.

National security concerns have long shaped international relations, with economic interdependence traditionally seen as fostering stability. However, recent geopolitical shifts have challenged this assumption. The strategic rivalry, particularly between the US and China, has raised the stakes of international competition and new forms of economic warfare. Historically committed to multilateralism, the EU faces pressures to reassess its approach due to an increasing use of economic coercion by other states. Emerging powers, particularly BRICS, are also redefining their roles in the global order, employing economic tools to counter Western hegemony. As unilateralism rises and the effectiveness of multilateral institutions like the WTO is questioned, a “new geo-economic order” appears to be emerging. This Chapter creates the basis for the normative and evaluative questions of this book by exploring how major economic players navigate national security concerns in an increasingly fragmented trade landscape.