This discussion paper elaborates on five serious flaws with proposals for investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in proposed Europe-United States and Europe-Canada trade deals known by the acronyms TTIP and CETA. The issues elaborated in the paper are: the unjustified replacement of judges with arbitrators, the lack of institutional safeguards of independence and fairness in ISDS, the privileging of foreign investors over other actors, the risk to European standards of regulation, and the fact that TTIP (and to a lesser extent CETA) would expand the scope of ISDS massively. The paper is written from a European perspective, considering that most European countries and the European Union have not agreed to ISDS in any past treaty with the U.S. or Canada and thus would assume much-expanded risks and constraints associated with ISDS due to TTIP or CETA.