Stephan W. Schill, writing in the World Trade Review, compares two divergent ICSID tribunal rulings regarding Argentina’s necessity defense during its catastrophic economic collapse. He dissects how different arbitrators evaluated the exact same fiscal emergency, exploring whether the survival of the state legally nullifies its pre-committed treaty obligations. The comparative case study provides razor-sharp legal analysis of the necessity defense, but its tight procedural focus ignores the devastating human cost of the Argentine crisis. This anchor case study serves future international lawyers by isolating the exact jurisprudential fracture where state survival collides with treaty consent. The analysis perfectly sharpens the thesis by examining the ultimate test case of whether legal consent can hold a state against its own economic survival.
Stephan W. Schill, Two Worlds of Necessity in ICSID Arbitration: CMS and LG&E (Web Page)
