Shadow Courts ― The Tribunals That Rule Global Trade

Arbitration tribunals are buried in thousands of trade treaties, linking more than 179 countries. Called Investor-State Dispute Settlements, or ISDS, these tribunals allow private corporations to sue sovereign nations if they believe terms of a treaty were violated. In 2010, tobacco giant Philip Morris International used arbitration tribunals to sue Sierra Leone and Uruguay for putting health-warning labels on cigarette packages, and it has gone on to file suits against Australia and the European Union.

Between 1959 and 1990, only about two dozen ISDS cases were brought; in the last few years, it's averaged forty cases a year, and 549 total. ISDS is included in giant trade pacts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which if passed would mean a huge boon for corporations to challenge the power of sovereign countries, and especially small and impoverished ones.Time correspondent Haley Sweetland Edwards goes behind the scenes to tell the story of the most outrageous recent arbitration cases, and takes a hard look at the power these shadow courts hold over the world.

Haley Sweetland Edwards is a correspondent at Time. Previously, she was an editor at theWashington Monthly, where she wrote about policy and regulation. From 2009 to 2012, she lived in Yemen and reported on a half-dozen countries in the Middle East with articles appearing inThe Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Foreign Policy online, and inThe New York Times' Latitude Blog. Her travel was sponsored largely by a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and the Overseas Press Club Fellowship. She started her career as a resident reporter atThe Seattle Times. She studied philosophy and history at Yale and journalism and politics at Columbia. She lives in Washington, D.C.