Introduction During and following the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the USTR assured stakeholders that novel features in the TPP's investment chapter would respond to legitimate concerns about the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS). Indeed, in our analysis on Investor-State Dispute Settlement, Public Interest, and US Domestic Law, we highlighted a number of serious shortcomings of investment treaties and their ISDS protections, including the impact that

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... S has on the development, interpretation, and application of domestic law. Now that the TPP has been publicly released, we can see that unfortunately none of these shortcomings has been resolved. In fact, in some areas, we even see a further evisceration of the role of domestic policy, institutions, and constituents. In their current form, the TPP's substantive investment protections and ISDS pose significant potential costs to the domestic legal frameworks of the US and the other TPP parties without providing corresponding benefits. In "Upgrading & Improving Investor-State Dispute Settlement," the USTR highlights how the "TPP upgrades and improves ISDS" and "closes loopholes and raises standards higher than any past agreements." Below, we respond to the USTR's claims, showing that ISDS in TPP has not been improved as USTR suggests. There are a number of problems from previous trade agreements that have been carried over into the TPP, and new provisions added to the TPP that do not appear in other US FTAs and that raise additional concerns. A forthcoming brief will discuss those issues in more depth; this note focuses specifically on the particular improvements that the USTR claims to have made to ISDS.