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Kluwer Arbitration Blog Wins CPR Award

On behalf of the many contributors to this blog and the good folks at Kluwer Law International, I am pleased to announce that this blog has won CPR’s 2011 award for best electronic media focused on ADR. The press release is here.

As most of you know, the CPR Institute is a nonprofit think tank and alliance of global corporations, law firms, scholars, and public institutions dedicated to the principles of commercial conflict prevention and alternative dispute resolution. The “Best Electronic Media Award” is presented annually to “a company, group, or individual that has produced exceptional electronic media that was focused on the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution.”

CPR pre [...]

The unwitting victims of arbitration´s success

As a university professor and a member of one of the last generations of arbitrators not initially trained in this field (in my case, coming from administrative law), I have been wondering for some time on the effect that the blossom of international arbitration is having in Latin-American students and young practitioners.

There is no doubt that for those foreign to it, arbitration appears as a particularly appealing field of practice. Not only it provides the opportunity of working in some of the most interesting matters and encountering some of the best lawyers and academics but it opens the door to developing a real international practice, something extremely unusual for those raised and [...]

Reflections on the New International Arbitration Global Survey

A major new survey on international arbitration conducted by Queen Mary University London and sponsored by White & Case revealed several interesting findings on corporate choices concerning international arbitration.*

As already reported by Global Arbitration Review, the survey shows “the extent to which the governing law is a driver of choice among those framing arbitration agreements, and the dominance of established arbitral seats.” Specific findings of the survey include:

• English law was used most frequently (by 40% of respondents), followed by New York law (17% of respondents);

• London was named as the preferred seat of arbitration (30%), followed by Geneva (9%), Paris, [...]

The European Commission’s Opposition To Intra-EU BITs And Its Impact On Investment Arbitration

The growing success of investment arbitration may collide with the European Commission’s attitude towards intra-EU BITs, as shown recently by a development reported in August 2010 (the IA Reporter, August 5, 2010, Vol. 3, No. 12) regarding the Eureko v. Slovakia arbitration. In this case, Eureko initiated a claim against the Slovak Republic based on the Netherlands-Slovakia BIT. In the jurisdictional phase of the proceedings, the arbitral tribunal invited the Commission to provide its observations on the claim. In its response, as reported by the IA Reporter, the Commission cast “serious doubts” on the jurisdiction of the tribunal to hear a claim based on an intra-EU BIT.

This deve [...]

More on Corporate Criticism of International Arbitration

I recently spoke at a conference co-sponsored by the Milan Chamber of Arbitration and the ICC on the occasion of the publication of the new Italian arbitration treatise entitled Commentario Breve al Diritto Dell’Arbitrato Nazionale ed Internazionale (CEDAM 2010) by my colleague Massimo Benedettelli, along with co-authors Claudio Consolo and Luca Radicati di Brozolo. The topic of my panel was general trends in international arbitration.

Although I would have liked to have spoken on a substantive trend in international arbitration, I decided I could not ignore a much bigger, procedural trend that has been the topic of conferences in both the United States and Latin America – that is the [...]

Here Comes the Sun …

The 2010 World Cup may have come and gone (good, or perhaps bad news, depending where you stand on this), as by the looks of it (at least from where I’m sitting in London, SE1), has our short-lived summer. Thoughts spring to mind: why did we ever complain about the sweaty carriage on the London Underground, the lack of air conditioning, or the lack of outside tables with umbrellas to sit and enjoy our summer Pimms?? So, for all those who are not reveling in Spain’s World Cup victory, and need a summer ‘pick-me-up’, here it comes …

The last time I had the pleasure of blogging was back in December, when I introduced several significant enhancements to Kluwer Arbitration, including a [...]