International Economic Law in 2025: Why This Handbook Belongs in Every Law Library
International Economic Law in 2025: Why This Handbook Belongs in Every Law Library
International economic law has never been more contested, more consequential, or more difficult to navigate. The year 2025 brought a fourfold increase in new tariffs affecting global goods imports — the highest coverage in over fifteen years of WTO monitoring. The WTO’s Appellate Body remains paralysed, with dispute settlement consultations falling from an average of 19 per year before the crisis to just 8.5 annually between 2020 and 2025. The United States has pivoted sharply away from multilateral engagement, pursuing executive-driven trade policy focused on tariffs, export controls, and national security investment screening. Meanwhile, investment treaty reform continues at pace, with a new generation of international investment agreements reshaping the standards of investor protection and dispute resolution worldwide.
In this environment, the need for a single, authoritative, comprehensive reference on international economic law has never been greater. The Routledge Handbook on International Economic Law, edited by Valentina Vadi and David Collins, provides exactly that.
A Handbook Built for the Complexity of Today’s Legal Landscape
This 504-page Handbook, published by Routledge in October 2025, brings together contributions from over 40 leading scholars and emerging voices in the field from across the globe. Its five-part structure maps the discipline with clarity and depth:
Part I: History and Theory — situating international economic law within the broader international legal order, tracing its development and examining its theoretical foundations. Valentina Vadi’s own contributions on the place of international economic law in the international legal order and the role of indigenous cultures provide essential framing.
Part II: International Trade Law — covering WTO frameworks, dispute settlement, trade in goods and services, and the growing body of preferential trade agreements. With WTO reform now a matter of institutional survival, this section provides the legal foundations every practitioner and researcher needs.
Part III: International Investment Law — examining investor-state dispute settlement, fair and equitable treatment, expropriation standards, and the ongoing reform of investment treaties. As UNCTAD’s 2025 analysis confirms, the investment treaty regime is in flux, with new-generation agreements rebalancing investor protections and state regulatory space.
Part IV: International Financial and Monetary Law — addressing the legal architecture of international finance, monetary regulation, and the role of institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. This section is increasingly relevant as currency policy, capital controls, and financial sanctions intersect.
Part V: Intersections with Other Legal Regimes — exploring tensions between economic liberalisation and environmental law, human rights law, and indigenous rights. These intersections are among the most actively litigated and debated areas of international law today.
The Context That Makes This Handbook Essential Right Now
The shift in US trade policy has created profound uncertainty across all three pillars of international economic law. In trade, tariffs have moved from a specialist concern to a central business risk, with sector-based measures targeting automobiles, pharmaceuticals, and strategic industries. In investment, US outbound investment regulations and national security screening are reshaping cross-border deal structures. In financial law, the interaction between sanctions regimes and monetary systems — from frozen Russian assets to the growing use of alternative payment systems — raises questions that sit squarely at the intersection of financial law and international economic governance.
South–South trade has grown from $500 billion in 1995 to $6.8 trillion in 2025, now accounting for more than a quarter of global trade. Yet the legal frameworks governing this growth — WTO membership, investment treaties, dispute resolution mechanisms — are under stress. Legal professionals advising institutions operating across these markets need a reference that reflects both the architecture of the system and its current tensions. The Routledge Handbook provides both.
Why Law Libraries and Academic Institutions Should Add This Title
The Routledge Handbook on International Economic Law is the first major comprehensive handbook on the discipline to be published since the current wave of US trade unilateralism, WTO Appellate Body paralysis, and investment treaty reform have fundamentally altered the landscape. It is not a textbook: it is a research reference, written by leading scholars for advanced study, practitioner use, and institutional collection building.
For law libraries serving faculties of law, economics, political science, and international relations — and for professional institutions whose clients operate in international trade, investment, or finance — this Handbook is an essential acquisition. At CLNZ Books, we supply academic and professional titles to institutions worldwide. This is a title we recommend without reservation.
Browse our full International Law collection or our Economics & Finance titles for related works.
Q&A
Q: What is international economic law and what does it cover?
A: International economic law is the body of international law governing economic relations between states and other actors. It encompasses international trade law (including WTO law), international investment law (including investor-state dispute settlement), and international financial and monetary law. It also intersects with environmental law, human rights law, and development law.
Q: What is the current status of the WTO Appellate Body and why does it matter?
A: The WTO Appellate Body — the final stage of the WTO dispute settlement system — has been unable to function since 2019 due to the blocking of new judicial appointments, primarily by the United States. This has significantly reduced the use of the dispute settlement system: consultations fell from an average of 19 per year (2010–2019) to 8.5 per year (2020–2025). Restoring a functioning dispute settlement mechanism is widely regarded as essential to the credibility of the multilateral trading system.
Q: What is investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) and how is it being reformed?
A: ISDS is a mechanism in investment treaties that allows foreign investors to bring arbitration claims directly against states for alleged violations of treaty obligations, such as expropriation without compensation or denial of fair and equitable treatment. Reform efforts — driven by UNCTAD and reflected in new-generation investment agreements — are recalibrating investor protections, expanding state regulatory space, and introducing investment facilitation and cooperation provisions.
Q: How does international financial law relate to international trade and investment law?
A: International financial law governs the legal frameworks for cross-border capital flows, monetary policy, and international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank. It intersects with trade law (e.g. currency manipulation as a trade distortion) and investment law (e.g. capital transfer provisions in investment treaties). The growing use of financial sanctions as a foreign policy tool has further deepened these intersections.
Q: Who are the editors of the Routledge Handbook on International Economic Law and what are their areas of expertise?
A: The Handbook is edited by Valentina Vadi (Adjunct Professor of International Law, University of Florence; Jean Monnet Fellow, European University Institute) and David Collins (Professor of International Economic Law, City Law School, City St George’s, University of London). Their specialisms span investment law, trade law, cultural heritage in international economic law, and WTO dispute settlement.
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