Anthea Roberts
About/Bio
Anthea Roberts is a Professor at School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University and a Visiting Professor for the Masters of International Dispute Settlement at the Graduate Institute and the University of Geneva. Anthea attends UNCITRAL Working Group III as part of the Australian delegation but she acts and writes in her independent academic capacity. She is a specialist in public international law, investment treaty law and arbitration, comparative international law and geoeconomics. Prior to joining the ANU, Anthea taught at the London School of Economics, Columbia Law School and Harvard Law School. She is serving or has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of World Trade and Investment and ICSID Review. She is also a Contributing Editor for EJIL: Talk! and International Economic and Policy Law Blog and a Reporter for the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Follow Anthea on @AntheaERoberts.
Recently Published
UNCITRAL and ISDS Reform: Lifelong Learning
How many International Investment Disputes have there been since 1973? How many International Investment Disputes are ongoing now? We do not know. There is no authoritative count. How many treaty-based awards issued by arbitral tribunals since 2000 are not publicly available? Again, nothing authoritative can be said except that a sizeable percentage of such awards are not available.
UNCITRAL and ISDS Reform: Moving to the Delivery Phase
The investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform process underway in UNCITRAL Working Group III has entered the delivery phase. The first four reform products were delivered in July 2023, when they were adopted by the UNCITRAL Commission. The Working Group plans to deliver more reform products – an advisory centre and possibly also guidelines on dispute prevention – to…
UNCITRAL and ISDS Reform: What to Expect When You’re Expecting
From September 5 – 16, the delegates of UNCITRAL Working Group III were back in Vienna to continue discussing ISDS reform. While it was possible for registered delegates to watch the proceedings online, it was only possible to make interventions in person. This approach, which we understand to be a general UN approach, decisively shifted the Working Group’s…
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Popular articles by Anthea Roberts
Being Charged by an Elephant: A story of globalization and inequality
April 19, 2017
Anthea Roberts
Along with many economists and globalization scholars, my favorite graph these days is the elephant graph. Named for its distinctive elephant-shaped curve (see below), this graph shows the rise in real incomes for people in different income brackets throughout the world over a twenty year period of intense economic globalization (1998 to 2008). Economists often like to…
UNCITRAL and ISDS Reform: China’s Proposal
On 19 July 2019, China submitted its proposal on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform to UNCITRAL. A Chinese version is available, though an English translation is yet to be posted. China reaffirms its commitment to ISDS as an important mechanism for resolving investor-state disputes under public international law. However, it takes note of significant…
UNCITRAL and ISDS Reform: Plausible Folk Theories
As observers of the UNCITRAL process, we watch the debates with great interest, writing about the emergence of different camps, giving perspectives on how the process fits within broader geopolitical developments, and offering potential models for moving forward. One thing that we are often struck by is how some of the field’s underlying narratives are…