You may not have heard of the area of international law known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), through which private corporations are able to sue governments that implement legislation that constrains their profits. But this private parallel legal infrastructure is one of the greatest threats to progressive governments all over the world.

If, say, a government attempted to force an international fossil fuel company to clean up after an oil spill, or introduced measures to disincentivize smoking, those governments could be sued by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries respectively. And this is exactly what happened in the cases of Chevron v. Ecuador and Philip Morris v. Australia.

ISDS provisions are written into hundreds of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) agreed between states, often on highly unequal terms. Wealthy states, home to powerful multinational corporations, have worked outside of the multilateral system to agree these treaties, pushing less powerful countries to agree to the inclusion of ISDS provisions if they want access to markets in the rich world.