Prominent Scholars Decry TPP's "Frontal Attack" on Law and Democracy
More than 200 legal and economic scholars—including President Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School mentor Laurence Tribe—have penned a letter to Congress warning that the pro-corporate Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) regime enshrined in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) “threatens the rule of law and undermines our nation’s democratic institutions.”
Click Here: NRL Telstra Premiership
As ISDS “threatens to dilute constitutional protections, weaken the judicial branch, and outsource our domestic legal system to a system of private arbitration that is isolated from essential checks and balances,” the academics urge (pdf) lawmakers to reject the TPP, despite the Obama administration’s full-court press to pass the trade agreement during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.
“If the TPP text were approved by Congress, we would not only be entrenching this inherently flawed mechanism, but significantly expanding it.”
—200 legal and economic scholars
The signatories—who also include Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, and Columbia University Professor and UN Senior Adviser Jeffrey Sachs—note that concerns they outlined in a March 2015 letter opposing the inclusion of ISDS provisions in the TPP and other multinational trade deals were ignored.
In fact, they write, “the final TPP text simply replicates nearly word for word many of the problematic provisions from past agreements, and indeed would vastly expand the U.S. government’s potential liability under the ISDS system.”
The letter continues:
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
“Today’s letter from top legal experts makes clear: ISDS undermines the American judicial system and tilts the playing field further in favor of big multinational corporations,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has argued many of the same points.
“This provision empowers companies to challenge laws and regulations they don’t like,” Warren said on Wednesday, “with friendly corporate lawyers instead of judges deciding their disputes. Congress should not approve a TPP agreement that includes ISDS.”
“The massive corporate coalition pushing for the TPP is aggressively lobbying to pass the pact in the lame-duck session.”
—Lori Wallach, Public Citizen
Though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last month that the TPP would “not be acted on this year,” experts have warned against celebrating the trade pact’s demise.
As Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach wrote last week, statements such as McConnell’s
Meanwhile, Wallach continued, “the massive corporate coalition pushing for the TPP is aggressively lobbying to pass the pact in the lame-duck session—that unique moment of minimum political accountability when the retired and fired in Congress get to come back and vote one more time knowing they will not be facing their voters again.”
However, she argued, “[t]he current political context, with the presidential nominees of both parties against the TPP coupled with rising public anger across partisan lines about the influence corporations have over governments and the decisions that shape our daily lives means the TPP can be stopped.”
