This chapter analyses the policies and practices related to resolving investor–state disputes through ISDS. In this area, three broad themes emerged from our data. First, there are practices of forming the defence strategy for specific investment arbitrations and handling ISDS proceedings. The main issue is whether to engage lawyers from private practice and, if so, to what extent. Second, we discuss the matter of coordination and communication between various governance actors during ISDS proceedings. The third issue is that of dispute prevention. Given the stakes, risks, and challenges resulting from ISDS disputes, many governance actors dealing with IIAs realise that dispute prevention is crucial in internalising the IIA disciplines. This section focuses on various training and educative programmes for bureaucrats that were designed, proposed, or implemented to increase the knowledge about and awareness of IIAs within the broad sphere of national governance. We end with a discussion on the blurring of the public–private divide through the engagement of private expertise in the service of the public when defending ISDS cases.

The Myanmar Investment Law (“MIL”) and related statutory and institutional reforms (such as the Myanmar Investment Commission) seek to provide a level playing field for local and foreign investors; ensure adequate investor protections to promote investor confidence; and provide a nascent grievance mechanism for the settlement of an investor-State dispute.This chapter examines the framework and structure that the MIL advances to protect investors; and at the same time, to preserve Myanmar’s regulatory authority to pursue legitimate objectives that are consistent with international investment law, such as to prohibit investments that are contrary to the public interest, and to adopt reasonable measures to protect it.

Pasargada is the fictitious name of a squatter settlement (or favela) in Rio de Janeiro. Because of the structural inaccessibility of the state legal system, and especially because of the illegal character of the favelas as urban settlements, the popular classes living in them devise adaptive strategies aimed at securing the minimal social ordering of community relations. One such strategy involves the creation of an internal legality, parallel to - and sometimes conflicting with - state official legality. This chapter describes Pasargada legality from the inside-through the sociological analysis of legal rhetoric in dispute prevention and dispute settlement and in its (unequal) relations with the Brazilian official legal system. My objective is to reveal many legal experiences that, because they do not fit the legal modernist canon, are ignored, marginalized, silenced, in a word, wasted.