Women in Arbitration: Lots of Talk, Any Changes?
Occasional articles, postings, etc come out which discuss the lack of female representation in international arbitration. Perhaps possible reasons are suggested, perhaps only statistics given, but it is still clearly an issue. Beyond talking about it – how can we actually help the situation? In an article from June 2009, Michael Goldhaber noted that in past arbitrator listings from FocusGroup only 4% of arbitrators were women. Some of these women were indeed very busy, and highly respected; yet, only 4% were women.
The first questions to address, perhaps, is why not a female? A fellow colleague of mine, a male, who is active in the international arbitration arena asked me this very questio [...]
Legal Education in the 21st Century
- By J. Martin Hunter, Essex Court Chambers,
for ITA
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 [...]
The right to a tribunal appointed expert
In a decision dated 14 June 2011 and published on 7 July 2011, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court dismissed an appeal to set aside an arbitral award holding that the right to the appointment of an expert by the tribunal is not violated where the respective request was not made in a timely manner and in proper form (4A_617/2010).
Decision
X (a Turkish company) and Y (a Polish company) were in dispute over the question of which party was responsible for the delays in the execution of the contractual work. The dispute was brought before an ICC tribunal seated in Zurich. With respect to the disputed question, each party submitted to the arbitral tribunal a technical expert report.
In an award of 30 [...]
Reflections on Vis From the Winning Team
[Editor's Note: Upon hearing the results of the Vis competition, I invited members of the winning team to do a blog post about their experience. Below are the reflections of the members of the University of Ottawa Vis team on winning the competition.]
It’s nice when hard work pays off. It’s even nicer when five students spend six months pouring their heart and soul into an arbitration problem involving the sale of squid and are rewarded with something as humbling as winning the Vis.
It was at the opening ceremonies at the opera house in Vienna that the magnitude of the Vis really hit us. We were a small cluster of five students and three coaches, surrounded by a sea of hundreds upon [...]
Swiss Federal Supreme Court Denies the Applicability of an Arbitration Clause in the Articles of Association to Liability Claims Against Board of Directors of an Insolvent Company
In a decision dated 8 December 2009, published on 13 June 2010 (case 4A_446/2009, published as 136 III 107), the Swiss Federal Supreme Court held that persons acting as board of directors of a company that subsequently became insolvent cannot rely on an arbitration clause contained in the articles of association of that insolvent company for liability claims filed against them by the insolvent company’s creditors.
Background
The articles of association of corporation Y (“Y”) contain an arbitration clause which applies in case of a dispute between Y and its members of the board of directors or its shareholders. On 5 January 2004, Y was declared insolvent. In March 2007, Y’s shareholder and cr [...]
The Swiss Federal Court Dismisses Two Appeals Concerning the Constitution of an Arbitral Tribunal
In two decisions both dated 11 January 2010, published on 16 April 2010 (cases 4A_256/2009 and 4A_258/2009), the Swiss Federal Supreme Court dismissed two appeals regarding the irregular constitution of an arbitral tribunal by stating that the complainant failed to sufficiently substantiate his allegations.
Background
In 2006, two ICC arbitrations were initiated. They had the same factual background, but were based on different (yet interconnected) agreements. In the first arbitration (dealt with in the decision 4A_256/2009), AY (“AY”), a company incorporated under the laws of the Czech republic, initiated an arbitration against X (“X”), a Czech citizen. In the second arbitration (dealt with [...]
