This entry has been originally posted in the University of Bristol Law School Blog as part of the IEL Collective Symposium II - Disrupting Narratives on International Economic Law: Theory, Pedagogy and Practice ; I’m re-posting it here for archival purposes. Roland Barthes was never particularly interested in the law. Were he alive today, however, it is hard to imagine that he would be a strong supporter of a regime like investment arbitration – a system which, in spite of its best original intentions, has long been exposed by its critics for the lack of balance in rights and obligations and the abuse of the mechanism to increase the already disproportionate power of multinational corporations vis-à-vis the state where they invest. However, his literary production can nonetheless serve as a model for inquiring on aspects of the investment arbitral regime that remain somehow at the margins of the scholarly critique. In his essay “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” (1971), Barthes the...