A big thank you to everyone who responded to our inaugural poll!  We’ve dusted off our calculators, put on our stats hats and prepared some charts and analysis for you.  But first, here’s a quick backgrounder:

Our first poll asked participants to rate three different potential reasons for the long-standing under-representation of women in arbitration:

• Generational issues: today’s top female arbitrators and arbitration law firm partners graduated at a time when proportionally fewer women entered legal practice
  
• Party appointment system that enforces the status quo by favoring an elite handful of repeat players
• Time demands: the hours and travel can be incompatible with having a family

We’ve had a great response from our readers on our very first poll.  But, perpetual strivers that we are, we’d like to receive even more responses!

If you haven’t already, please take our poll question, which is at the end of this post (and also conveniently located on the right sidebar of the website).  Please encourage your colleagues to take the poll, which will take less than a minute to complete.  A link to our original post about the poll is available here.

We will compile our results and analysis in a special post next week.

Here at the Blog, we do our fair share of pontificating and opinionating. But now, we’d like to hear more from you! Today we’re launching our first poll question, and we hope you’ll participate in droves.

Our first topic concerns the under-representation of women in arbitration, a topic I blogged about a few months ago. I argued that while the paucity of women might be most visible at the very top of the arbitration world, where there are very limited numbers of women arbitrators and arbitration partners, the problems faced by the generation of younger women seeking to make a viable career in arbitration are no less concerning. We have room to improve both in women’s leadership and in women’ [...]

Over the summer, I read two discussions that gave some fascinating, albeit wholly depressing statistics about women arbitrators.  The first was a great discussion initiated by Lucy Greenwood of Fulbright & Jaworski on the OGEMID listserv, which noted that only 6.5% of all commercial arbitrator appointments (both party appointments and institutional appointments) are of women.1  The second was an article by Gus Van Harten, which found this very same meager number—6.5%–as the percentage of women appointed as ICSID arbitrators through May 2010.²

For many women in arbitration, this information is probably not a surprise.  Both discussions helpfully identify some additional cold, hard data o [...]

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently issued a decision that has some interesting implications for the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in the U.S. against foreign state agencies or state-owned companies. American readers, get ready for a review of Civil Procedure 101 on personal jurisdiction!

The United States is signatory to the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, which is incorporated into U.S. law via Chapter 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act. In turn, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, or “FSIA,” waives immunity and permits U.S. courts to enforce arbitral awards rendered against forei [...]

What makes an international arbitrator different from a national judge? All of us in the arbitration world have a pretty solid answer to this question. At what point do the distinctions between an international arbitrator and an international judge melt away? That’s a bit of a trickier question, depending on the case.

With the increase in investment law jurisprudence in recent years, we’ve become accustomed to seeing international judges sit on the same investment arbitration panels as commercial arbitrators with their own private practices. In any given arbitration, international judges serving as arbitrators are subject to the same challenge standards as their commercial arbitrat [...]