200 scholars attack TPP as threat to democracy

Truth Dig  - 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 regime enshrined in the Trans Pacific Partnership  “threatens the rule of law and undermines our nation’s democratic institutions.”

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 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.

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.