International investment law has evolved dramatically in the last two decades. There are now over 3,000 agreements and an abundance of case law, and some see the system as chaotic and unstable. Differences between bilateral investment treaties and contrary decisions by arbitral tribunals certainly give that impression. The development of the European Commission’s model for negotiation in the wake of the Treaty of Lisbon is examined, revealing that the investment system is in reality, for all its decentralization and flexibility, dynamically stable and favours the reuse of preexisting standards. The chapter on the recent Canada–European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (ceta) shows that although the European Commission had a chance to try something new, it instead drew heavily on the complex of institutional arrangements already in place, notably albeit not exclusively the u.s. model.