ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to conduct a study of valuation in a certain area of legal practice. By focusing on a particular context, it aims to show more broadly how such a study can be conducted, and offer a glimpse of the importance and rich potential of a legal study of valuation. It provides the context of the enquiry, and show how valuation has come to occupy a central space in the modern practice of Investor-State Dispute Settlement, where in the past it was much overshadowed by highly politically charged disputes, now evaporated, between “First World” and “Third World” countries about appropriate standards of compensation. The chapter explains how the approach to valuation developed by tribunals and commentators is characterised by an understanding of it as a technical exercise, consisting in establishing, with the help of financial expertise, the reduction in market value suffered by the investor, which is viewed as an economic fact that can be objectively ascertained.
