Abstract

This paper examines indirect expropriation in international investment agreements, and compares current foreign investments protection with property protection in XIX century USA, when the US Supreme Court adhered to an abstract and «de-physicalized» conception of property, later contested by legal realists. Its central claim is that the indeterminacy of indirect expropriation, together with the shortcomings of investor state arbitration, poses a new and underestimated challenge to state sovereignty, and that the developing «web» of bi- and multilateral treaties could eventually lead to give transnational corporations a «right to an unchanging world», as US Supreme Court did more than a century ago, this time on a global scale.