Taylor St John
About/Bio
Taylor St John is a Researcher at PluriCourts, University of Oslo, on leave from her position as Lecturer in International Relations, University of St Andrews. Her monograph, The Rise of Investor-State Arbitration: Politics, Law, and Unintended Consequences, was published in 2018. She previously held positions at PluriCourts, the London School of Economics, and Oxford, where she received a DPhil. Taylor attends UNCITRAL as an observer from iCourts, University of Copenhagen.
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 Taylor St John
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…
UNCITRAL and ISDS Reform: Visualising a Flexible Framework
In UNCITRAL, states have broken through the impasse of the incrementalist and systemic reformer camps. They have all agreed that they want to pursue systemic reform, but they have different ideas about what that entails and what to prioritise. In broad terms, agreement seems to be coalescing around three main blocks of reforms: updating some of…