The Charles N. Brower Lecture on International Dispute Resolution was given at 4:15 pm, Thursday, April 10. The speaker was Sundaresh Menon, Chief Justice of Singapore. THE TRANSNATIONAL PROTECTION OF PRIVATE RIGHTS: ISSUES, CHALLENGES, AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS * In the wake of the two wars that rocked the order in the twentieth century, the right of nations to self-determination was enshrined in Article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations. (1) Among the most important developments of the post-war era was the disintegration of colonial empires and a consequent massive increase in the number of states and polities. (2) With this came a proliferation of borders, inside of which were different sovereign legal systems and laws. At the same time, the rebuilding and reconstruction of the post-war created both the impetus and the opportunity to focus on development and economic growth. (3) So even as the number of discrete states and polities increased, the witnessed a rapid increase in the connectedness of its economies and its cultures. Thomas Friedman observed in his bestseller, The World Is Flat, (4) what might now be accepted as conventional wisdom: that increased connectivity has resulted in the accelerated flattening of the world, facilitating the phenomenon of globalization. But globalization occasions the need for a more homogenous and harmonized legal framework that can accommodate the vast increase in economic relationships which cross borders that might not previously have existed or have been quite so firm. With the fragmentation of colonial empires and the birth of scores of new states in the so-called Third World, (5) developed and developing countries found themselves separated by massive gulfs in terms of their relative states of social, economic, and political development. Under these circumstances, there were always going to be difficulties in attaining transnational harmonization in law, policy, and practice pertaining to commercial transactions. At the dawn of a new millennium, we face the challenge of dealing, on a global scale, with movements in opposite directions. On the one hand, the emphasis on decolonization and self-determination in the post-war era has seen a movement toward building barriers and fixing legal and political boundaries between jurisdictions. On the other hand, globalization sees a movement to break economic barriers and transcend boundaries. While the first movement sees growth in the number of individual systems of law, the second calls for laws and legal systems that are not so tightly constrained by jurisdictional boundaries so that they can more effectively support the immense growth in transnational trade and commerce. My focus today is on the legal protection of private economic rights in the transnational arena. The term international economic law has been adopted as a shorthand reference for regulation in this immense field. (6) For conceptual and analytical clarity, I propose to approach my subject by considering the regulation of transnational economic relationships at three different levels: First, where a party's rights are not regulated or governed by any contract, but where there is nonetheless a need to protect one's interest or rights in commercial property; Second, where there is a contract between the parties, by which they look to protect their rights as between themselves; and Third, where a foreign investor looks to protect its investment against unlawful interference by a host state. These are not exhaustive of the range of regulatory mechanisms that affect transnational economic relationships. For instance, even though international trade law (or world trade law) (7) relates to rules and conventions that seek to manage trade relations between states, these still have a direct impact on individual actors. …