By Martin Hunter and Javier García Olmedo

In a previous blog we discussed the concept of plain packaging of tobacco products and the pending investment arbitration claims brought by Philip Morris International (PMI) against Uruguay and Australia. The question raised was whether these anti-tobacco schemes contravene the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (Paris Convention). In particular, whether plain packaging infringes the right to use trademarks and/or interferes with the core function of trademarks. The present contribution is intended to open the floor for discussion as [...]

In February 2010, Philip Morris International (PMI) filed a request for arbitration under the ICSID Convention against the Republic of Uruguay. ¹ The claim relates to two pieces of legislation enacted by Uruguay which require tobacco companies to comply with strict plain packaging measures. These regulations limit the use of registered tobacco trademarks, allowing the brand name of the tobacco product to be written in a standard font only. In addition, health warnings will be displayed on the package, which will leave tobacco corporations with no option but to sell cigarettes in generic packages.

PMI contends that the Uruguayan regulations violate several provisions of the Switzerland-Urugua [...]

Empirical research shows that modern law students, at least at post-graduate level, wish to have some options to learn something about the skills of ‘lawyering’. Students often say that they want to have more than just the letters ‘LLM’ after their names. They pay substantial tuition fees to obtain these post-graduate degrees, and they wish at least to make a start on learning how to be a practising lawyer. This is especially true for students who intend to become dispute resolution lawyers.

Conventionally, legal education has been confined to the classroom. In England it was left to the Inns of Court and the Law Society, and in the civil law systems to the Bar authorities, for bridging [...]

During the last quarter of 2010 the German Arbitration Institution (‘DIS’) and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (‘CIAarb’) held a conference in Frankfurt to debate the relative merits of the ways in which civil law/common law court procedures are adopted or adapted for use in international arbitrations.

One of the more interesting sessions was devoted to the use of ‘experts’. Unsurprisingly, a majority of the participants in Frankfurt were civil lawyers. Intriguingly, most of the civilian lawyers present favoured the common law style ‘party-appointed’ expert witness approach, and many of the common lawyers preferred the civil law ‘tribunal-appointed’ expert prac [...]

The sense of relief enjoyed by NGO observers and other followers that UNCITRAL Working Group II’s Arbitration Rules revision project was finally completed in the Summer of 2010, after seemingly endless debate, has been diminished to some extent by the publication of the agenda for the next WGII meeting, to be held in Vienna in October 2010, which puts back on the table the difficult question of ‘transparency’ in investment treaty arbitrations.

Confidentiality has long been perceived as an implied term in international arbitration. This was seen to follow from the privacy of arbitral proceedings. The current trend, however, is to question this proposition. This is particularly the case in inv [...]