ABSTRACT
This chapter documents: investors' mobilization of property meanings in a transnational tribunal; the impact of legal-ideological struggles on a transnational regime; and the paradoxical recreation of non-market state regulatory authority through property rights disputing. It is commonly assumed that private property rights have been empowered with the creation of transnational trade tribunals, such as the one authorized by the North American Free Trade Agreement's (NAFTA). This precipitated a legal-ideological struggle over the reach of neoliberal market-based protections, the scope of international investment law, and, ultimately, the parameters of state sovereignty. Unlike the World Trade Organization (WTO) where disputing is state-state, the NAFTA disputing framework is an investor-state arbitral forum. NAFTA provides for state-state disputes. NAFTA's framework was pulled directly from the US bilateral investment regime (BITs). Procedurally, NAFTA adjudicatory framework employs existing institutional structures of arbitration that is the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and the United Nations Convention on Trade Law (UNCITRAL).
