Commercial, State-to-State, and Investment Arbitration: A Comparative Perspective (LAW-RS-ARBIT-22)

LAW-RS-ARBIT-22

Description

First and second year researchers as well as LLM researchers can gain 3 credits by attending one of the researcher-taught seminars in each academic year; they can also register for and attend further researcher-taught seminars without gaining credits.

Arbitration is one of the earliest forms of legalized dispute resolution that is not centred around the state and its court system, often characterized as working on the interplay of law and globalization. In the past few decades, it has also become one of the most popular forms of settling cross-border disputes, with state courts around the world experiencing a significant decrease in the case flow. The course aims to expose students to the concept of arbitration and its three international forms, namely international commercial arbitration, state-to-state arbitration, and investor-state arbitration. Adopting a comparative perspective, the course familiarizes researchers with the dominant form of out-of-court dispute settlement and enables them to supplement their overview of the field. The anchor tying the course together is the underlying concept of arbitration as a voluntary, legal form of dispute settlement. The starting point of our exploration will be the types of matters a certain form of arbitration seeks to address. In international commercial arbitration this would be commercial disputes between private actors, in state-to-state arbitration it would be inter-state disputes involving both commercial and political disputes, finally, in investor-state arbitration it would be disputes between investors and states. Evidently, here we find dissimilarities between the different kinds of arbitration. The analysis of each field will highlight the similarities and differences of its own issues as compared to those previously discussed, thereby weaving a comparative perspective into the fabric of the seminar. How do the issues relevant to international commercial arbitration differ from those in state-to-state arbitration? How, in turn, are these distinct from those in investor-state arbitration? In a second step, we briefly set out the different modes that have arisen to address these issues. Important points to touch upon in this regard are whether, when and why arbitration became an important method for resolving such conflicts; as well as whether and how arbitration overshot the target thereby leaving itself vulnerable to criticism.

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 19 to 26 September.