The University of Georgia School of Law’s spring 2025 International Law Colloquium recently welcomed Michigan Law’s Professor of Law Julian Arato, who presented his working paper, “The Institutions of Exceptions.” Timothy Meyer, Professor of International Business Law at Duke University School of Law, served as Arato’s faculty discussant.

Arato currently serves as the Faculty Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at the University of Michigan School of Law. His research focuses on public international law, international investment law and arbitration, international trade, contracts, corporations, and private law theory. Arato is also a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law.

Below is an abstract of Arato’s working paper:

International economic law binds states’ hands in the interest of liberalizing markets in various ways, including cross border trade in goods and services (trade) and capital (investment). The treaty regimes for both trade and investment do this by disciplining states through legal rules, while preserving a modicum of governmental power over policy. Though not always recognized as such, the preservation of policy space in these regimes typically involves exceptions-style reasoning by adjudicators – formally in the case of most trade and some investment treaties, and informally in the investment treaty regime more generally. This “exceptions paradigm” of justification has worked well in the trade regime, where it has been especially key to securing a workable balance between market disciplines and regulatory policy space in the WTO/GATT context. But it has been less successful at striking a reasonable balance in the investment regime – irrespective of whether the paradigm has been formally codified in an exceptions clause. This Article seeks to explain why, by focusing on the institutions within which this mode of justification is embedded. Certain institutional differences between these regimes help explain the varied success of exceptionalism in trade and investment, in particular: the right of action (public vs private); the degree of judicial centralization (ad hoc arbitration vs court system); and the available remedies (retrospective compensation vs prospective injunctive relief). I argue that it is trade law’s public-oriented institutions that have made the exceptions clause workable – not the other way around. By contrast, investment law’s private-oriented institutions make that system particularly inhospitable to exceptions-style justification.

This year, Professor Desirée LeClercq is overseeing the colloquium, which is designed to introduce students to features of international economic law through engagement with scholars in the international legal field. To view the full list of International Law Colloquium speakers, visit our website.

This program is made possible through the Kirbo Trust Endowed Faculty Enhancement Fund and the Talmadge Law Faculty Fund.