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.

The fifth chapter continues the excavation and evaluation of evidence in the making of a government pension contract by describing the circumstances under which reforms have proven effective against constitutional contention. It probes the power of reservation clauses, the credence of contemporary commentary like employee handbooks, the impact of persuasive authority, and the influence of the Supreme Court of the United States. It identifies which forms of proof have been the most effective and why, along with what matters have been missed. In assessing the evidence for and against the creation of a contract, this chapter prioritizes sources, comments on their respective import, and otherwise argues for courts to undertake an expansive inquiry to determine whether government pension benefits receive contract protection.

In attempts to identify root causes of terrorism, the view that terrorist actors are poor and uneducated often plague the speeches and works of politicians and media outlets. The grouping of these issues is appealing, making terrorism a seemingly easier to solve problem. Yet, rigorous academic research over the past two decades helps refute this view. Studies have revealed that while some stereotypical notions of terrorists are correct, such as that they are usually single, young males, others are wildly misleading. Terrorists are often wealthier and better educated than their peers in the broader population. This, perhaps surprising, academic finding has been independently identified in numerous studies around the world and has subsequently opened the topic of terrorism up to further investigations on microeconomic factors. The question in this chapter then turns to, what other characteristics might influence terrorism? Studies into individual religion have yielded results that are complex and inconclusive. Macroeconomic investigations into theories that involve heroic acts or screening effects have thus far failed to capture a fully substantiated mechanism. Additional research focusing on grievances, media, systematic-indoctrination, and psychological motivations should contribute to a fuller picture of the typically wealthier, better-educated males that choose to engage in terrorism.

Trade and investment in services and intellectual property grows rapidly, driven by new technological advances, while servicification resolutely alters FDI patterns. As digital services trade grows, its aterritorial nature becomes a source of concern for policymakers and regulators, while companies affected by public interventions seek legal avenues to protect their rights, often throuth recourse to investor-State arbitration. Against this background, this chapter delves into the universe of digital services supply in an increasingly polarized international economic order. It identifies the challenges that servicification poses on international investment law, before focusing on the recent cases of TikTok (involving the digital services supply of the social media giant in the US) and Uber (relating to the service supply of the American company in Colombia and other countries) but also on Metaverse as a new challenge for economic regulation to discuss the applicable substantive investment law obligations and the scope for upholding national security concerns by the regulatory State. Throughout the chapter, I discuss related challenges that regulatory authorities face by emerging patterns in services trade and investment; the potential impact of measures such as geoblocking, bans or ringfencing; and the repercussions of such geo-economic fragmentation for the investment regime.

Insurance and its related products and instruments plays an important role in the management of risk and potential loss from terrorist attacks. This chapter will introduce the reader to the concept and structure of insurance and how the sector approaches catastrophic risks like terrorism. It will then explore the roles that insurance has, and that different actors play, in the process of insuring against loss caused by terrorism. In order to insure a risk, it must be possible to assess it and to model the potential loss to the insurer. So the process of how insurers assess and model the risk will be laid out. This sets the conditions for the challenges that such modelling faces and treatments of those challenges. The chapter concludes that the process of validation of models is critical to their success and is an excellent area for future research.

Terrorist groups face a wide range of organizational issues. They have to recruit members, raise funds, articulate a political vision, develop operational plans, train personnel, execute attacks, and justify their actions. Unlike most organizations, however, they must do so while remaining as covert as possible, making all the normal challenges of organizational management significantly harder. This chapter reviews the organizational issues that terrorist groups face and that counterterrorist organizations should take into account.