Economic globalization has been a defining feature of the world for the past half century. With the rise of globalization, business operations have become increasingly transnational, and supply chains went global. However, besides the economic opportunities globalization has created, transnational business operations have damaging effects on public interest regulations. For instance, the phenomenon of regulatory competition or the „race to the bottom” has led to downward pressure on standards of public regulations. The business operations that have become increasingly transnational contributed to the development of international investment law that is a much more powerful source of international adjudicative review of states in their sovereign conduct than any other areas of international law. As a result, it enters into the national domain much more powerfully and extensively than other areas of international law. Furthermore, this area of the law favors transnational economic interests over the regulatory powers of States. How did globalization remain a false promise? What is the relation between “neoliberal “economic policy and the “original sin”? How does the situation of Central European countries look like? Is there a way to somehow tame the forces of unfettered globalization? These and similar questions are to be addressed by M. Sornarajah, world-renowned Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore in a conversation with Lénárd Sándor, Head of Center of International Law at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium.

M Sornarajah LLB (Ceylon), LLM (Yale), LLM, PhD, LLD (London) is Emeritus Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore. He was CJ Koh Professor at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore. He was the Tunku Abdul Rahman Professor of International Law at the University of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur. He was Head of the Law School of the University of Tasmania, Australia. He is the author of several books, among them is “The International Law on Foreign Investment” that has become one of the fundamental books of international investment law.

Lénárd Sándor has served as a chief counsel at the Constitutional Court of Hungary and as a legal advisor at the European Parliament in Brussels, where his focus was on constitutional affairs of the European integration. He has previously taught various fields of international public law at Pázmány Péter Catholic University. He defended his doctoral thesis at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and his research area involves especially the international legal dilemmas of economic globalization and the question of public interest regulation.

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