ARBITRATION WORLD New Ports of Call: The Agreed Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Signals a New Landscape for Pacific Trade, Investment, and Dispute Resolution By Robert Houston (Singapore), CJ Hoppel (Tokyo), and Haig Oghigian (Tokyo) In early October 2015, 12 Pacific states announced the conclusion of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“TPP”), an agreement establishing rules for a free-trade area (“FTA”) that proponents argue will set the standard for the future of trade in this dynamic region. If ratified by all parties, the TPP will govern an FTA comprising 40 per cent of global GDP among the 12 signatories: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam (the “Parties”). The Parties released the text of the TPP on 5 November 2015 into a charged political climate that featured, among other challenges, the public debate over the agreement’s relative merits and detriments and the political manoeuvring of the upcoming 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. Proponents tout the TPP as establishing a baseline expectation for international cooperation on a range of areas from the liberalization of trade to the future protection of the environment and human rights, not only among the signatory states, but also for other parties (and notably China) that are expected to accede to the agreement in the future. Opponents, on the other hand, argue that the agreement fails on a number of points, from limited periods of protection of intellectual property to the potential loss of local industry or jobs. The text of the TPP with chapter summaries is available at the website of the U.S. Trade Representative (at https://ustr.gov/tpp; quotations below are from the summaries available there or from the text of the TPP itself). The following is a review of some of the highlights. 48 K&L Gates: ARBITRATION WORLD