New Scholarship: The Rules, Practice, and Jurisprudence of International Courts and Tribunals
- By Chiara Giorgetti, White & Case LLP,
for White & Case
The Rules, Practice, and Jurisprudence of International Courts and Tribunals (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2012) has just shipped.
I am the (proud) editor and a contributor of the book and am delighted to have the opportunity to bring it to the attention of this group. I think it will be of special interest to arbitration practitioners.
The book examines the main existing international dispute resolution bodies in a systematic, comprehensive and accessible way.
To the extent possible, chapters are structured similarly, and each chapter explores a specific dispute resolution forum.
After a short introduction of the forum, each chapter provides essential information of the institution examin [...]
Recent Swedish Ruling on Arbitrability
- By Ola Nilsson, White & Case LLP,
for White & Case
On 7 October 2011 the Svea Court of Appeal ruled on whether an arbitral award should be declared invalid or annulled because the dispute – as alleged by the plaintiff – was not arbitrable under the Swedish Arbitration Act.1 In finding that the dispute was arbitrable, the Svea Court considered several interesting issues analyzed below.
The background is as follows:
To build a golf course in Moscow, a Russian company (the “Russian Borrower”) had borrowed 22 million Swedish Crowns from a Swedish bank (the “Swedish Bank”) under a loan agreement entered into on 24 January 1990 (the “Loan Agreement”). The Loan Agreement included an arbitration clause providing for arbitration und [...]
Piercing the Corporate Veil and Enforcement
King Solomon might have split the baby had he not realised the identity of its parent in time. Judges and arbitrators – some 3,000 years later – might be quicker to identify a company’s real group structure, but are they any better in splitting parent from child-subsidiary?
A typical corporate veil piercing case involves a controlling shareholder that sets up an undercapitalized corporation to incur obligations to third parties; the shareholder then siphons off the proceeds of its corporate borrowing received from those third parties. When the company’s debts become due the company has insufficient assets to meet its repayment obligations. At that point, the controlling shareholder reli [...]
More Interesting Anti-Suit Injunction Cases
- By Steve Abraham, Norton Rose LLP,
for YIAG
Anti-suit injunctions have certainly received their fair share of air time (and some would say more) as a result of the West Tankers debate – about which this blog entry is not. Now that all eyes are on anti-suit injunctions, it is interesting to keep an eye on how the cases post West Tankers pan out, in particular as regards non EU states. One recent case and one pending case, both before the English Court of Appeal, are of interest as regards the interaction between anti-suit injunctions and the New York Convention. The cases are Midgulf International Ltd v Groupe Chimique Tunisien [2010] EWCA Civ 66 and Shashoua & another v Sharma [2010] EWCA Civ 15.
In the Midgulf case, the Court of [...]
State Responsibility for Contract Breaches: Possible Insights from the U.S- Mexican General Claims Commission
- By Jennifer Thornton, US Department of State,
for ASIL
The United States and Mexico signed the General Claims Convention of September 8, 1923 and thereby constituted the U.S.-Mexico General Claims Commission.* The Commission was asked to resolve all claims by U.S. and Mexican citizens against the other government for loss or damage to their person or property interests arising out of the period of political upheaval that followed a series of Mexican revolutions in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Perhaps the most cited opinion of the General Claims Commission is the one it issued in Neer v. United Mexican States, a denial of justice case brought by an American widow who alleged that the Mexican government violated international law when [...]
The Strange Case of Expert Legal Opinions in Investment Treaty Arbitrations
I have always found the submission of expert legal opinions on matters of international law to investment treaty tribunals rather odd. Why are expert opinions needed and what is their status? To begin, the opinion is submitted to an international arbitration tribunal often comprising leading public international lawyers (and sometimes current or former judges of the International Court of Justice). This tribunal’s role is to interpret and apply the international investment agreement in question in accordance with public international law. Further, an international tribunal operating under public international law is deemed to know the law (jura novit curia). Next, we have the cou [...]
