Academic literature on the topic 'Barcelona Traction'

This chapter discusses a share certificate issued by the defunct Barcelona Traction company, and explores the layers of its meaning and significance. First, to the general public it tells the story of a Canadian company, with Spanish subsidiaries, whose shares were mainly owned by Belgian citizens. Second, it reminds lawyers of the dispute between Belgium and Spain before the International Court of Justice, in the matter of the corporate hijacking of the company at the hands of Francisco Franco’s cronies. Third, it evokes to international jurists controversial technicalities like the nationality of transnational corporations and the nature of state obligations owed erga omnes, that is, to the international community. The chapter illustrates how a piece of paper has—within a certain epistemic circle—quasi-mystical connotations, speaking to the promises and the unfulfilled potential of international law.

At a time where the future of investment law is often reinvented, this exercise of juris-fiction aims at exploring the relationship between the Barcelona Traction judgment and the course of foreign investment law to determine whether there was room for another evolution. Relying on a theoretical approach that combines normativism with legal realism in an original way, the study looks at different turning points in the course of foreign investment law in order to isolate those which appear as contingent, ie those which could have happened as they could have not happened. Such an enquiry leads to assessing the relative weight that the Barcelona Traction case has played in the remarkable expansion of investor-state dispute settlement. After a short introduction, section II introduces the methodology and used concepts. Section III looks at a few events in the history of foreign investment law in order to distinguish what was contingent and what was unavoidable while, at the same time, identifying what could be turning points. After having set the attention on the Barcelona Traction judgment as a contingent turning point among others, section IV further assesses the causality link between the judgment and foreign investment law through an exercise of imagination in which are considered not only the possible but also the likely effects of a different outcome to the case. By way of conclusion, section V suggests that the Barcelona Traction judgment itself, rather than foreign investment law, was, however, so tightly constrained that it could hardly have been different. It however highlights that the same cannot be said of the Diallo judgment, thus showing that contingency is often related to legal indeterminacy.

Chapter 7 traces a ‘road not taken’ in the history of regulating global corporations in pursuit of economic democracy, the conditions that led to its failure, and the emergence of the contemporary regime that separates market and politics. The late 1960s saw a rare moment of unity in the struggle over the regulation of corporations among decolonized nations, which together formed the New International Economic Order and civil society of the Global North in a bid to defy unruly corporations. While North–South opposition to corporate power gained traction, the tensions between capital-exporting countries were augmented. These conditions opened a window of opportunity for a new international policy regime to regulate global corporations. But this window would not remain open for long. In the aftermath of the Barcelona Traction Case (1970), capital-exporting countries sought an alternative legal framework of a new regime of international investment law and redefined the normative content of corporate responsibility in human rights terms.

This paper presents an enhancement to the electrical infrastructure that applies to those AC railway power supply systems which have neutral zones. The proposed upgrade allows an improved degree of controllability of the infrastructure, making it possible to perform power routing in traction electrical grids. The modified system consists on the addition of controlled power electronic devices connected in parallel to both sides of the neutral zones. The paper discusses the advantages of such a system in a real section of the high-speed Madrid-Barcelona.