The Born Supremacy: Review of International Arbitration: Cases and Materials
Gary Born has just published a great new casebook that is certain to become a standard text for international arbitration courses around the world. Everyone knows Born’s multi-volume treatise, which is invaluable as a reference tool, but hardly appropriate for the classroom. Now we have both, a great casebook to introduce the material to students and a definitive treatise for the practitioner. The Born empire continues to grow.
The most distinctive feature of the casebook is its comparative focus. Each chapter addresses a specific topic from the perspective of multiple jurisdictions. As a result, it is the kind of casebook that will be adopted by professors in law schools around the g [...]
International Arbitration and Mediation: A Practical Guide
We’ve been asked by Kluwer to say a few words about our new book, International Arbitration and Mediation: A Practical Guide. Before explaining what we tried to accomplish, it may be worth noting what we did not set out to do, which was to write a learned treatise about international arbitration (or mediation). For that, there are plenty of admirable texts on the market that we admire and would strongly recommend.
What we decided to do instead was provide a book that complements the learned treatises, based on how the two of us have lived international dispute resolution, one as an in-house lawyer and the other as an external counsel. And we have given special attention to our mistakes. The [...]
Arbitration in Douglas Johnston’s The Historical Foundations of World Order
Professor Roger Alford’s recent posting, “The Arbitrator as Diplomat”, discusses the role of “diplomatic arbitration,” a concept with a long historical pedigree. Some of that history (and much more) is contained in the late Professor Douglas M. Johnston’s posthumous opus, The Historical Foundations of World Order: The Tower and the Arena (2008). The book was awarded the ASIL’s 2009 Certificate of Merit for a Preeminent Contribution to Creative Scholarship and was the subject of a panel discussion at the ASIL Annual Meeting in March 2009. It was feted as an extraordinary work of scholarship. As Professor W. Michael Reisman discusses in the book’s preface [...]
Review of Gary Born’s International Commercial Arbitration
Gary Born’s magisterial new work International Commercial Arbitration, published in two volumes this year by Kluwer, represents, in the range and depth of its coverage, and in the rigour and perception of its analysis, the most complete exposition of the law of international commercial arbitration ever available. Yet perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book is what it represents in terms of a coming of age of the field of international commercial arbitration, such that a book of this kind could be written at all.
Born states modestly in his Introduction, that his treatise ‘is intended to be clear, direct and accessible’, and so it is. Indeed, devotees of Gary Born’s ear [...]
Born and Arbitral Awards
Part III of Born’s treatise concerns International Arbitral Awards. He initially points out that some 90% of international arbitral awards are voluntarily complied with. “This reflects the parties’ contractual undertakings to arbitrate and to comply with the resulting arbitral award, the efficacy of the arbitral process (which leaves the parties believing that their dispute has been fairly resolved), and the likelihood that the award can be coercively enforced….Nevertheless, not all international arbitral awards are voluntarily complied with. The ultimate test of any arbitration is therefore its ability to render an award which, if necessary, will be recognized and enforced in releva [...]
Gary Born on the Role of Arbitrators
This excellent treatise provides an in-depth analysis of virtually every aspect of international commercial arbitration. The book offers a comparative approach to arbitration examining the provisions of different nationals, arbitration rules and international conventions.
The present review is focused on chapters 11 and 12, which explore and explain respectively: (i) the selection, challenge and replacement of arbitrators; and (ii) the rights and duties of arbitrators. Generally, these chapters provide a thorough understanding of the diverse legal traditions that underlie these issues.
Chapter 11 comprehensively covers all issues which should be considered regarding the means of s [...]
