As I mentioned in my sister comment, because we have evidence that allowing companies to do this would've resulted in the tobacco lobby being able to overturn p

As I mentioned in my sister comment, because we have evidence that allowing companies to do this would've resulted in the tobacco lobby being able to overturn public health laws in Australia (because they tried to do it within an arbitration courts that they didn't have jurisdiction in). If the TPP was signed in 2011, Australia would've had to pay damages to Phillip Morris for passing plain packaging laws (something that is now becoming a more common law in many jurisdictions). The problem with the EFTA (or ECJ) comparison is that those courts are designed to deal with the laws and directives passed by the EU/EEA. The entire point of the EU/EEA is that members democratically vote on laws that will affect members -- thus a violation of said laws by a government is similar (in principle) to any other violation by a government where an individual can sue the government for violating a law. The TPP arbitration process is not like this at all. There is no democratic agreement on common laws that member states must not violate -- it's a process to allow a corporation to sue a government for enacting "discriminatory" laws (unless those laws are "fair and proportionate" -- which obviously is a very wishy-washy constraint).