State Succession and Commercial Obligations sets out to answer once and for all the age-old question: Do commercial obligations survive state succession? Tai-Heng Cheng accomplishes this goal via careful analyses of efforts by the United Nations to codify the law of state succession, as well as of recent state successions involving East Timor, Hong Kong, Macau, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. The insightful text identifies a common thread running through these seemingly disparate events. Because of globalization and our interdependence, transnational decision-makers have collectively shaped international law to protect the international infrastructure from being disrupted by state succession and to protect entities from being debilitated by post-succession obligations. State Succession and Commercial Obligations makes another major breakthrough by showing that the policy considerations and decision-making processes are similar in both state and government successions. Unlike prior theories that were bound by technical distinctions between state and government succession, this book’s approach helps decision-makers bring order to both state and government successions that continue to be problematic today, such as the “regime changes” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. State Succession and Commercial Obligations is the only major treatise in fifty years to appraise the global development of the law of state succession and commercial obligations. This treatise is indispensable to legal scholars seeking to understand contemporary international law, judges and arbitrators adjudicating succession disputes, and transactional and trial lawyers representing financial institutions, corporations and states when succession is imminent or has occurred. Because this book distills complex legal concepts into elegant ideas, it is also fascinating reading for a general audience that has an interest in global affairs and the transformative successions since the end of the Cold War. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

First published in 1956, this book presents an account regarding the legal principles governing the consequences of changes of sovereignty, focusing particularly on British practice during the preceding 150 years. The legal principles governing British practice are compared with those of other states in order to record the main points of doctrinal agreement or divergence.

In State Succession and Commercial Obligations (2006), Tai-Heng Cheng applies the New Haven School methodology to an opaque and unsettled body of international law: that governing the commercial rights and duties of states, creditors, and other participants in the unruly process of state succession. Rather than work within inherited conceptual and doctrinal frameworks, which have seldom proved either helpful or descriptively accurate, Cheng provides a fresh perspective on the issues. He argues that a policy-oriented perspective on state succession ameliorates the "descriptive inaccuracy" and "normative deficit" of inherited theories. Part I of this review considers the former claim; Part II the latter. I find Cheng's analysis of state succession relative to commercial obligations sophisticated, pragmatic, descriptively comprehensive, and for the most part, normatively compelling. But it may be too ambitious. Defining disruptions to global commerce as the indicia of state succession tends to inflect, and at times to bias, the general analysis of the diverse phenomena that fall within the rubric of state succession. This commercial focus can obscure or normatively predispose our understanding and appraisal of equally vital, but non-economic, dimensions of state succession, including the core policy goals - self-determination and global order - that Cheng identifies and recommends. To a certain extent, this compromises the work's descriptive accuracy and normative appeal. But far from "failing to provide the very guidance that real-life decision makers expect from their lawyers," as critics of the New Haven School often charge, Cheng's policy-oriented analysis strikes me as more helpful to practicing lawyers and decision makers than anything that has preceded it.

This study discusses the succession of states to treaties and other obligations or rights, seeking answers to the question Does a new state succeed to its predecessor's international rights and duties, and if so, to what extent?

A Guide to State Succession in International Investment Law provides a comprehensive analysis of State succession issues arising in the context of international investment law. The author examines whether a successor State is bound by the investment treaties and State contracts which the predecessor State had signed with other States and foreign investors before the date of succession. Actors who are called upon to apply rules of State succession in investment arbitration cases will find this book a valuable source of practical guidance with strong theoretical foundations.