Soo-hyun Lee
Faculty of Law
About me
Soo-hyun Lee is a UN 2030 Agenda Programme PhD Researcher at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, where he works on matters of international trade and investment law and disputes as well as in interdisciplinary approaches involving development economics and Law & Development (L&D).
Prior, he was an International Law and Dispute Settlement Associate at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, South Korea, specializing on issues of international economic law, specifically international trade and investment law. Before joining the Asan Institute in 2015, he worked with the UN Office of Legal Affairs, International Trade Law Division, providing substantive and technical contributions to the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). He was also a Research Fellow at the Columbia Centre on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) at Columbia University, Faculty of Law and is currently a Fellow for the Asian Institute for Alternative Dispute Resolution (AIADR). He founded and operates a firm that provides legal and advisory services to Korean corporations on matters of economic, policy and legal trends around the world.
He pursued his undergraduate education at New York University and Bucknell University (US) and his postgraduate education at the United Nations University, University of Tokyo, Cambridge University (Hughes Hall) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Research interests involve the nexus between international economic law, dispute settlement, sustainable development, structural and development economics.
About my research project
The objective of the project is to understand a state's right to regulate in international economic law, specifically international investment law, through the use of policy measures meant to advance sustainable development. In doing so, the project identifies the substantive and procedural meaning of sustainable development in international economic law and compares it to the way that sustainable development policy is defined and assessed by the United Nations, with the UN 2030 Agenda at its core. To understand these different aspects of the nexus between international economic law and sustainable development policy, the project looks at decent work and economic growth (SDG 8) and partnerships for the goals (SDG 17), which serve as gateways to the wider development frameworks of the United Nations and the World Bank, as well as select methods in development, structural and environmental economics.
The project is designed to strengthen UN approaches to development policy assessment, better integrate sustainable development into international economic law practice and more closely unite them in both practice and research.