The Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is pleased to announce that both the Hague Conference on Private International Law and the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) will each again be offering a summer internship for students who have or can obtain NYU PILC grants. These grants are only available to JD students.  There is one internship for each institution. You can learn more about these institutions on their websites. The PCA internship focuses on international arbitration.  The Hague Conference internship involves issues of private international law, sometimes in the commercial area and sometimes in the family law field. The Hague Conference does try to accommodate a student’s interest, but often they will specify ahead of time what they plan for the student intern and that may affect the selection process.

Interested students should send a letter of application to Professor Linda Silberman (linda.silberman@nyu.edu) (Co-Director of the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law) and copy her assistant Stephany Ramos (Stephany.ramos@nyu.edu).  Applications should include the following information: a resume, your unofficial law school transcript with first-semester grades (to the extent you have them), and a statement of interest and experience.  In particular your foreign language abilities, any experience abroad, and courses of study in areas involving private and public international law and international arbitration should be noted.  The statement should also include reasons why you would like the internship and what skills you would bring to it.  Identify whether you are interested in one or both of the internships, and if both, which one you would prefer and why.  You may submit an application prior to the receipt of first-year grades and then update that information as it comes in.

For additional information, interested applicants may contact Professor Silberman directly or current NYU students who had one of these internships in the past.

For the Hague Conference: Ella Hetfield, 2024 summer intern (emh9516@nyu.edu);  Ellie Webb, 2023 summer intern (mew10003@nyu.edu)

For the PCA: Junius Williams, 2024 summer intern (jw3621@nyu.edu); Jas Singh, 2023 summer intern (js13467@nyu.edu)

Applications should be submitted to Professor Silberman, at the latest by January 20, 2025.   Professor Silberman will be in her office until the end of the 2024 calendar year.  She is not in residence at NYU in January and February, 2025, but can speak with students by phone. Once applications are in, she may try to schedule a few interviews of the strongest candidates via Zoom. A decision will be made by mid-February.

Professor Franco Ferrari, the Director of NYU School of Law’s Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law has just published a paper in French on the importance of the law of the seat in the peer-reviewed Revue de droit international et de droit comparé (L’importance du siège de l’arbitrage, Revue de droit international et de droit comparé (2024) 225-251). In the paper, Professor Ferrari shows, as he did in a series of other papers (including in his paper Plures leges faciunt arbitrum, 37 Arbitration International (2021) 579-597), that in international arbitration the lex loci arbitri has not lost its importance, which is not to say that it operates as the exclusive source of the arbitral process. In Professor Ferrari’s view, it is the law of the seat that primarily furnishes arbitration its regulatory norms, in the form of ground rules in accordance with which any arbitration may take place at the arbitral seat. But he also shows that the law of the seat is not the only law imposing itself upon an international arbitration. In other words, the regulatory sovereignty of the state of the seat of arbitration is not necessarily the only one to be triggered during the different stages of an arbitration’s life-cycle. This is due to the fact that this regulatory sovereignty encounters both subject-matter limitations and territorial limitations, and, therefore, depending on what matter is to be addressed – and when and by whom – may call into play the regulatory sovereignty of States other than that of the seat.

The Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to announce that on October 7, 2024, Honorable Justice Cortesi will give a talk titled “The Interpretation and Application  of the CISG: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. The in-person event, to take place at NYU School of Law, Furman Hall 900, 245 Sullivan Street, will focus on whether the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, CISG, is interpreted and applied as intended by its drafters. Justice Cortesi will point to the difference in methodology applied by the courts of different Contracting States to the CISG and show what is wrong with certain interpretive trends that can be identified in the courts of certain Contracting States. He will also address the reasons behind these trends.

The talk by Justice Cortesi will be followed by a Q&A session, which will be moderated by Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Executive Director and an expert on international sales law.

Honorable Justice Francesco Cortesi graduated cum laude from Bologna University School of Law in 1994; he then specialized in international commercial law at Tilburg University School of Law (Netherlands).

In 1999, Justice Cortesi was appointed to the District Court of Bologna. In 2001, he was appointed to the District Court of Rimini, where he mainly dealt with disputes regarding contractual matters, consumer law issues, and professional malpractice torts. In 2007, he moved to District Court of Forlì, where he was able to focus on those very same areas of law. During his tenure there, he rendered some of the most relevant decisions concerning the CISG, many of which have been translated into various languages, including English, and are taught at law schools around the globe.

In 2006, Justice Cortesi was appointed to the Government Committee for the revision of the Italian Civil Code. In January 2015, he was appointed to the Italian Supreme Court, becoming one of the two youngest justices ever appointed to the Italian Supreme Court. In 2018, he was appointed to the Research Department of the Italian Constitutional Court. Over the years, Justice Cortesi has been lecturing at the Bologna University School of Law mainly on commercial and consumer law matters and course on the “Methodology of law”. He is also a two-time scholar-in-residence at the NYU Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law. He is also a prolific author focusing mainly on private law and constitutional law matters.

Participation in the event is free of charge, but you will need to register. To do so, please use this link: https://forms.gle/PiYNXi3iv3Qbi1N27

The Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law at NYU is glad to be able to invite you to a seminar titled “The EU in the Gulf region” with the participation of Mr. Luigi Di Maio, the EU Special Representative for the Gulf region. The seminar, to take place on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 – 6:30-8:00 pm Lipton Hall, NYU School of Law, 108 West 3rd Street, NY, NY 10012, will be moderated by Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Executive Director.

Luigi Di Maio, who has been the EU Special Representative for the Gulf region since June 1, 2023, served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy from September 2019 to October 2022. In 2022, he was President of the of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly. From June 2018 to September 2019 he held the positions of Deputy Prime Minister of Italy, Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Minister of Labour and Social Policies. From March 2013 to March 2018 he was Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies and a Member of the European Union Affairs Committee in the 17th Italian legislature. During his mandate as Foreign Minister he chaired, among others, the G20 Foreign Affairs Ministers meeting, the G20 Trade Ministers meeting, the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Afghanistan, the June 2021 plenary Ministerial Meeting of the International Anti-Daesh Coalition, as well as the first Mediterranean Ministerial Dialogue on the Food Security Crisis in June 2022. He was the chair of three annual editions (2019, 2020, 2021) of the MED Dialogue Conference aiming to develop a positive agenda for the wider Mediterranean region, at a time of pandemic and political and economic transition, based on multilateralism as a strategy for conflict resolution.

Franco Ferrari is the Clarence D. Ashley Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law at NYU School of Law. Before joining NYU, he was a full professor of law at Tilburg University (in the Netherlands), the University of Bologna, and the University of Verona (in Italy). After serving as a member of the Italian delegation to various sessions of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) from 1995 to 2000, he was Legal Officer at the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, International Trade Law Branch, from 2000 to 2002, where he was responsible for numerous projects, including the preparation of the UNCITRAL Digest on applications of the UN Sales Convention. He has published more than 360 law review articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries in various languages and 50 books in the areas of international commercial law, conflict of laws, comparative law, and international commercial arbitration. Professor Ferrari, a recipient of the 2018 Certificate of Merit for High Technical Craftmanship and Utility to Practicing Lawyers and Scholars awarded by the American Society of International Law, is a member of the editorial boards of various peer-reviewed European law journals.

Registration is mandatory; to register, please use this link.

NYU School of Law’s Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to be able to announce that on September 16, 2024, it will host a seminar titled “Restituting Nazi-Confiscated Art: A Restatement”.

The in-person only event, to take place from 6.30-8.00 pm in the Lester Pollack Colloquium Room, located at 245 Sullivan Street, NY, will feature Professor Matthias Weller as the main speaker and Professor Francesca Ragno, Professor Clayton P. Gillette, and Mr. Alfred Fass as commentators, while the Center’s Executive Director, Professor Franco Ferrari, the seminar’s convener, will act as moderator.

As you may know, in 1998, 44 States endorsed the “Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art”, 11 soft-law principles to encourage “just and fair solutions” for artworks and cultural property that had been taken from Jewish people in the Holocaust. These principles have set in motion a far-reaching process of restitution of artworks outside court proceedings producing thousands of decisions in the six most active countries: Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland – good reasons to distill from this practice a “Restatement of Restitution Rules for Nazi-Confiscated Art” in order to identify recurring issues, tipping points, and a “grammar of reasons” that will help to address recurring points of controversy. And it is this “Restatement”, elaborated by Professor Matthias Weller and his team of PhD researchers over the last five years, that Professor Weller will present on the occasion of the event hosted by the Center. In his presentation, Professor Weller will focus on the concept behind and the results of this research project, possible implications for international practice, as well as the context of his work in Germany, where the Government is currently undertaking a major reform of the restitution process, with implications also for arbitration.

Although participation in the event is free of charge, given the limited space, registration is required.

You can register using this link: https://forms.gle/EGGQa68YHdjfyYhp8

For more information, please see these short bios of the speaker, the commentators, and the moderator:

Matthias Weller, Mag.rer.publ., MAE, is the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Professor for Civil Law, Art and Cultural Property Law, a Director of the Institute for German and International Civil Procedural Law, and a Founding Member of the Center for Reconciliation Research. He studied law at the University of Heidelberg and, as a scholar of the German Scholarship Foundation, at the University of Cambridge,. He was the Joseph Story Fellow for Private International Law at the Harvard Law School in 1998/1999. He worked for an attorney at the Bar of the German Federal Court of Justice in 2008/2009 and contributed to almost 100 appeal cases in civil and commercial matters. He is, inter alia, a member of the German Arbitration Institution (DIS) and the Court of Arbitration for Art (CAfA), a subdivision of the Dutch Arbitration Institution. In 2024, next to completing the Restatement Project, he organized and delivered, commissioned by the German Government, the „International Study on Strengthening the German Advisory Commission“, i.e., the Commission that is currently hearing cases on the restitution of Nazi-looted Art in out-of-court mediatory proceedings. He is also acting as arbitrator, in particular in cross-border disputes.

Francesca Ragno is Full Professor of International Law at the Department of Political and Social Science of the University of Bologna and NYU Global Professor of International Arbitration (Paris Program). She graduated in Law (J.D.) with honors at the University of Bologna and obtained her PhD from the University of Verona. Throughout her career, she has done research and lectured in Italy and at many universities abroad, such as the University of Heidelberg, Paris Nanterre and the University of Pittsburgh (as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair). Her teaching and scholarship span public international law, EU law, international trade and business law, transnational litigation, conflict of laws, international commercial arbitration and art law. She is a qualified attorney in Italy.

Clayton P. Gillette is the Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law at NYU School of Law, where he teaches in the areas of contracts, commercial sales, and local government law. He has also served as Vice Dean at NYU School of Law. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Gillette served as the Perre Bowen Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and as the Warren Scholar in Municipal Law and Associate Dean at Boston University. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and Columbia Law School. Professor Gillette earned his J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan and a B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College. Before entering academia, he clerked for Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and was associated with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton in New York City.

Alfred Fass, a businessman and historian, is the great-grandson of Nuremberg toy manufacturer Abraham Adelsberger (1863-1940), who owned an art collection of at least 1,000 objects. After his company Fischer & Co. ran into financial difficulties at the end of the 1920s, Adelsberger used parts of the collection as loan collateral with lenders such as Dresdner Bank. The Abraham Adelsberger Art Research Project of the Institute for Art History at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation, reconstructs the collection and also investigates the role of banks in monetizing the objects. While Abraham Adelsberger sold works of art at auction before 1933, the family lost the remainder of the collection due to Nazi persecution. In 1939, Abraham Adelsberger fled with his wife Clothilde to Amsterdam, where he died in 1940. Clothilde Adelsberger was deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1943 and survived the Holo­caust.

Franco Ferrari is the Clarence D. Ashley Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law at NYU School of Law. Before joining NYU, he was a full professor of law at Tilburg University (in the Netherlands), the University of Bologna, and the University of Verona (in Italy). After serving as a member of the Italian delegation to various sessions of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) from 1995 to 2000, he was Legal Officer at the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, International Trade Law Branch, from 2000 to 2002, where he was responsible for numerous projects, including the preparation of the UNCITRAL Digest on applications of the UN Sales Convention. He has published more than 360 law review articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries in various languages and 50 books in the areas of international commercial law, conflict of laws, comparative law, and international commercial arbitration. Professor Ferrari, a recipient of the 2018 Certificate of Merit for High Technical Craftsmanship and Utility to Practicing Lawyers and Scholars awarded by the American Society of International Law, also acts as an international arbitrator both in international commercial arbitrations and investment arbitrations. 

This is to announce that the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law and, thanks to Professor Francesca Ragno (from Bologna University’s Department of Political Science), Bologna University will host an in-person event focusing on the 2023 reform of the Italian arbitration regime. The event will highlight the good, the bad, and the ugly of the new regime.

The event, to take place on June 28, 2024, starting at 4.00 pm local time, in Bertinoro, south of Bologna, will be held in Italian.

The speakers will be Hon. Justice Francesco Cortesi (Italian Supreme Court) and Professors Massimo Benedettelli (Università degli Studi di Bari), Giuditta Cordero-Moss (University of Oslo), Chiara Giovannucci Orlandi (Bologna University), Luca Radicati di Brozolo (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore), Francesca Ragno, who is also the co-convener of this event together with the Center’s Director, Professor Franco Ferrari, the Clarence D. Ashley Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, Marco Torsello (Verona University), and Elena Zucconi Galli Fonseca (Bologna University).

The various talks will address, inter alia, the arbitration culture in Italy and abroad, arbitration in Italy from an international perspective, arbitration and the jurisdiction of domestic courts, the independence and impartiality of arbitrators, the determination of the law applicable to the merits, and the recognition and enforcement of awards as well as the arbitrability of corporate disputes.

For the full program, please click here.

NYU School of Law’s Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to announce that, together with SciencesPo Law School and Universidad Austral Buenos Aires, it will host a conference on the myth and reality of party autonomy in international commercial arbitration. The in-person conference, to be held in Spanish, will take place in Buenos Aires, on June 7th, 2024, from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM local time.

The speakers will be Francisco A. Amallo, Paul Arrighi, Diego P. Fernandez Arroyo, Roque Caivano, Maria Ines Corra, Domenico Di Pietro, Sandra Gonzalez Vila, Mariana Lozza, Maria Blanca Noodt Taquela, Julio Cesar Rivera (h), Veronica Sandler, and Joe Tirado.

Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Executive Director, will make some introductory remarks and give an overview of the issues to be addressed over the course of the conference, which will be divided into two sessions, dedicated to potential limits to party autonomy in choosing the law applicable to the merits and whether the parties really own the arbitral process, respectively.

The conference will be preceded by a presentation of two books co-authored by Professor Ferrari and Professor Friedrich Rosenfeld in Spanish, together with Professors Julio Cesar Rivera (h) and Juan Ignacio Stampalija, respectively. For more information, please click here: https://bit.ly/3xjZ4zT .

The Center is glad to announce that, together with SciencesPo Law School, Queen Mary University of London, and National University of Singapore Law, it will host once again the Cross-Examination Moot. The Cross-Examination Moot, which won the Award for the Best Development in Arbitration in 2022, is a competition for university teams with an exclusive focus on cross-examination techniques in international arbitration. Students will attend various rounds of hearings during which they will cross-examine each other’s witnesses and experts (https://www.crossmoot.com/).

This year’s case concerns a dispute over the coding of software for the life sciences industry, including accusations of improperly using and misappropriating intellectual property rights.  The registration for this year’s edition, the 4th edition, to take place from November 16th – 20th, 2024 in Paris, has just opened (to register, follow this link).

Professor Franco Ferrari, the Executive Director of the NYU School of Law’s Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law will participate in the Dubrovnik Conference on Cross-Border Dispute Resolution, co-hosted by the Law Schools of the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Verona, and the University of Zagreb. The Conference will start on Wednesday, May 8th, 2024, with a half-day session on cross-border professional responsibility and privilege, followed by full-day sessions on Thursday, May 9th, and Friday, May 10th, covering essential aspects of international arbitration and international litigation. Each day will include discussion-oriented presentations and workshops on practical international arbitration and litigation issues. Professor Ferrari will participate as a speaker on both Thursday and Friday. His talks will focus on the importance of the seat of arbitration and forum shopping, respectively. 

The other presenters will be Professor Ronald A. Brand (University of Pittsburgh School of Law), Professor Milena Djordjevic (University of Belgrade), Professor Dora Zgrabljić Rotar (University of Zagreb), Professor Giesela Rühl (Humboldt University Berlin), and Professor Marco Torsello. For more information, including the full program, please click here.

The Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to be able to announce that its Director, Professor Franco Ferrari, has just published the Spanish version of the book titled “Recognition and Execution of Foreign Arbitral Awards: A Concise Guide to the New York Convention’s Uniform Regime”, which Professor Ferrari co-authored with Professor Friedrich Rosenfeld, and which Professor Charles T. Kotuby edited. The Spanish version, titled “Reconocimiento y ejecución de laudos arbitrales extranjeros”, was prepared by Professor Juan Ignacio Stampalija, a professor at the Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires.

This edition analyses case law from major arbitration jurisdictions, including, thanks to the contribution of Professor Stampalija, many Latin American ones, to explain the New York Convention’s sphere and scope of application, the duty to recognize and enforce arbitration agreements and arbitral awards as well as its limitations, the grounds for refusal related to jurisdiction, those related to proper notice and the ability to present one’s case, the grounds for refusal related to procedure and those related to the award’s status under the law applicable to it, as well as the grounds for refusal related to public policy, and the procedure and formal requirements for recognition.

This is the second book co-authored by Professor Ferrari in Spanish, the first one being a comparative introduction to international commercial arbitration, which Professor Ferrari co-authored with Professors Friedrich Rosenfeld, John Fellas, and Julio Cesar Rivera (h). titled “Arbitraje Comercial Internacional”.

The Center is glad to announce that it will host, together with SciencesPo Law School, an in-person conference to take place on April 24, 2024, at NYU School of Law titled “Exceptionalism in International Commercial Arbitration”. This conference is the second conference co-hosted by the Center and SciencesPo Law School on the topic of exceptionalism, the first one having been held in Paris, at SciencesPo Law School, in November 2023.

The aim of the conference is to highlight by means of a comparative exercise that there are very many differences among the various international commercial arbitration regimes, despite claims of convergence. The speakers will identify features of various arbitration regimes, which are peculiar to those arbitration regimes. In doing so, they will address, inter alia, the arbitrability of claims, arbitration clauses in adhesion contracts, the competence-competence principle, the constitutional review of arbitral awards, deference to decisions upholding an award, the duty of disclosure, the extension of arbitration agreements to non-signatories, resort to the forum non conveniens doctrine at the enforcement stage, and pre-arbitration requirements.

The speakers will be Rafael Alves, Jessica Beess und Chrostin, Caroline Kleiner, Pedro J. Martinez-Fraga, Francesca Ragno, Julio Rivera Jr., Friedrich Rosenfeld, Daniel Schimmel, Linda Silberman, and Juan Ignacio Stampalija. Professor Franco Ferrari, the convener of the conference, will act as moderator. For more information, including on how to register, please click here.

On April 23, 2024, the Center will host Judge Fabienne Schaller, who will give a lecture titled “The Evolution of French Arbitration Law: Teaching From Recent Case Law”. Judge Schaller will focus on decisions rendered in 2022 and 2023 by the International Commercial Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal (ICCP-CA) of which Judge Schaller is the President. Specifically, she will address the decisions that have either developed or changed the French arbitration regime.

As for Judge Fabienne Schaller, she is a President in the International Commercial Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal (ICCP-CA). Before taking up this position, she served as an Appeal Judge in the Commercial Division of the Paris Court of Appeal (2016-2018), specializing in transport law, unfair competition, agency, and wrongful termination of contracts. She served as a first instance Judge in the white collar crime division of the High Court of Paris (2014-2016). Between 2008 and 2014, she worked at the Ministry of Justice participating in negotiations for EU directives on procedural safeguards in criminal proceedings and several international conventions within the Counsel of Europe in Strasbourg. Fabienne holds a master in law from Paris Nanterre Law School and an LL.M. in trade regulation from NYU School of Law. After practicing as a lawyer in Paris and New York, she joined the Bench in 1997 and was appointed a Judge in the first instance.

For more information, and for how to register, click here.

The Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to announce that it is convening, together with Bucerius Law School, McGill University – Faculty of Law, and University of Verona School of Law, an in-person arbitration conference focusing on soft law. The event, titled “Soft Law in Arbitration: Concepts and Examples”, will take place on Friday, March 22nd, 2024, starting at 11.00 am, at the University of Vienna, thanks to the generous invitation by Professor Paul Oberhammer, the Dean of the Law School.

Over the years, many soft law instruments addressing various issues that often come up in arbitration (including evidentiary issues, party representation, conflicts of interest, etc.) have been elaborated with the goals of providing guidance to both parties and arbitral tribunals. Still, the increase of the number of these instruments has raised questions as to the impact of soft law in general, and some of these instruments in particular. The conference will address not only the underlying concept of soft law, but also the consequences of the proliferation of soft law instruments, such as their constraining power and repercussion on the flexibility of arbitral proceedings, their relationship with hard law, the role of soft law in the determination of the applicable law, the relevance of soft law for matters of procedure, the use of soft law in investment arbitration, etc. 

The various topics will be addressed by Professors Marco Torsello, Friedrich Rosenfeld, Pilar Perales Viscasillas, Geneviève Saumier, Caroline Kleiner, Andrea Bjorklund, and Dr. Ajar Rab.

Opening remarks will be given by Professors Paul Oberhammer and Stefan Kröll. Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Director, will act as moderator.

For the full program, see here.

The Center is glad to announce that it will host, together with SciencesPo Law School, the 4^th edition of the Intergenerational Arbitration Symposium (IGAS). The in-person Symposium, which will take place on Tuesday, March 12, 2024, from 9.00 am – 12.30 pm, at SciencesPo Law School, allows young scholars interested in commercial arbitration to present their ideas and have more experienced scholars and practitioners comment on their presentations and the papers on which their presentations are based.

This year’s event will be divided into three parts, focusing on “Arbitration beyond Party Autonomy”, “State Control of Arbitral Awards, and “Arbitration and Climate Change”. The speakers at this year’s edition of the IGAS will be Mesut Akbaba, Gustavo Alfonso Delgado Bravo, Estefania Delgado, Saasha Mapani, Marco Seregni (NYU LL.M. ’23), and Chitransh Vijayergia.

Professor Giuditta Cordero-Moss, Mr José Ricardo Feris, and Mr. Noah Rubins, will act as discussants, and Mr. William Brilliat-Capello, Ms. María De La Colina, and Ms. Magdalena Bulit Goni as moderators.  

The conveners, Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Director, and Professor Diego P. Fernández Arroyo will give opening and closing remarks, respectively.

For the detailed program, click here.

To enroll, follow this link: https://www.sciencespo.fr/ecole-droit/en/events/fourth-intergenerational-arbitration-symposium/

The Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to be able to announce that it will host an arbitration seminar together with ADA University School of Law. The event, titled “International Arbitration in a Globalized World: Challenges to Fundamental Concepts and Perspectives,” will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, on February 15^th, 2024.

The event is part of a series of seminars hosted by the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law in different countries together with institutions operating in those countries. The events are intended to bring together academics, practitioners, and arbitrators to examine certain fundamental features of international arbitration to determine whether the role attributed to them corresponds to reality and is justified from a theoretical perspective, and, to the extent that this is not the case, how they should be reconsidered, taking into account modern arbitration practice and the expectations of various stakeholders, such as the parties, the arbitrators, the public at large, and the arbitral institutions.

Opening remarks will be given by Dr. Fariz Ismailzade (Vice Rector, ADA University), Dr. Rashad Ibadov (Founding Dean, ADA University School of Law) and Hon Kamala Abiyeva (Chair of the Commercial Chamber of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Azerbaijan), and Prof. Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Director.

The event will feature Prof. Franco Ferrari, Toghrul Guluzade (Adjunct Lecturer, ADA University, Member of London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA), Head of Legal Department “Azerbaijan Industrial Corporation” OJSC), Prof. Kamalia Mehtiyeva (Université Paris-Est Créteil, President of Azerbaijan Arbitration Association), and Domenico Di Pietro (Independent Arbitrator) as speakers and commentators.

Shirin Gurdova, Dr. Aygun Mammadzada, Shahlar Mammadov, and Kamil Valiyev will act as discussants.

For more info, please click here.

Join us for a seminar co-hosted by NYU School of Law’s Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law, the University of Oslo’s Centre for Commercial Law, and convened by Professor Giuditta Cordero-Moss.

The in-person event, titled “Drafting Contracts and International Arbitration,” will take place on February 8th, 2024, at NYU.

The event will take the form of a panel discussion among current and former transactional lawyers involved in drafting, negotiating, and deciding on international commercial contracts. The purpose of the discussion is to address contract clauses the construction of which has proven to raise issues, clauses that the drafts intended to be interpreted literally but may be read differently by arbitrators, etc. The panelists will discuss, among others things, the circumstances under which these clauses are drafted and the expectations of the drafters when they insert them into the contract.

The event is part of a series of workshops organized around the world, including in Oslo, Rome, Paris, London, Sao Paolo, and Singapore. It is part of an empirical research project, which analyzes whether international contracts are construed uniformly in arbitration, or whether legal traditions play a role despite the framework being an international one.

The starting point of the research is the realization that lawyers spend considerable resources to draft contract terms that reflect the interests of the businesses they represent. But, in case of dispute, will arbitrators give effect to the contract terms as drafted? Apparently not, and certainly not always, according to a pilot study carried out by Professors Giuditta Cordero-Moss (University of Oslo), Diego P. Fernandez Arroyo (SciencesPo), Cristiano Zanetti (Universidade de Sao Paolo), Gary Bell (NUS), and the Center’s Director, Professor Franco Ferrari. 

The pilot study can be found on the Kluwer Arbitration Blog under the title “Pilot Empirical Contracts in Project on Construction International Arbitration.”

The panelists are Gregory Classon, Myrna Barakat Friedman, Richard Gray, Mark Kantor, and Lisa D. Love. The event will be moderated by Prof. Giuditta Cordero-Moss; Professor Ferrari will give the closing remarks. For more info (including the exact time and venue, on how to register, etc.), please see the conference flyer.

The Center is glad to be able to announce that it will host a seminar together with the Singapore International Arbitration Centre and Maxwell Chambers. The in-person seminar, titled “Challenging Fundamental Notions of International Arbitration”, to take place on January 25th, 2024, from 2.00 pm – 6.00 pm SGT, at Maxwell Chambers, will examine certain fundamental features of international arbitration to determine whether the role attributed to them corresponds to reality and is justified from a theoretical perspective; and, to the extent that this is not the case, how they should be reconsidered, taking into account modern arbitration practice and the expectations of various stakeholders, such as the parties, the arbitrators, the public at large, and the arbitral institutions.

Opening addresses will be given by Daryl Chew (Chairman of Maxwell Chambers, Partner at Three Crowns LLP, Singapore), Kevin Nash (Registrar, SIAC), and Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Executive Director.

As per the attached program, Professor Ferrari will then give a lecture on “Party Autonomy”, arguing that there are limits to what is considered the most important element and characteristic of arbitration. Timothy Cooke (Partner at Reed Smith LLP, Singapore) and Rebecca James (Partner at Linklaters, Singapore) will act as discussants.

The second lecture, focusing on “Cost and Time Efficiency of International Commercial Arbitration”, will be given by Kevin Nash; Professor Darius Chan (Singapore Management University; Fountain Court Chambers; Director, Breakpoint LLC) and Xuanzhong Wang (Deputy Counsel, SIAC) will comment.

The last lecture, entitled “The New York Convention’s Uniform Regime”, will be delivered by Domenico Di Pietro (Di Pietro Arbitration); Matthew Secomb (Partner at White & Case LLP, Singapore) and Jae Hee Suh (Partner at Allen & Overy, Singapore), will act as discussants. For more information, see the flyer here.

The Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law is glad to announce that it will host, together with the School of Law of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and SciencesPo Law School, an arbitration conference focusing on current issues and future challenges. The event, to take place on the campus of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago on Nov. 16^th and 17^th, 2023, will be divided in various parts, focusing on transparency in international arbitration, the importance of case management conferences in complex arbitrations, the scope of arbitrability, economic hardship in international arbitration, the law applicable to the merits and the impact of non-State rules, the New York Convention’s interpretation, the clean hands doctrine, ESG principles in arbitration, and the State as claimant in international arbitration, respectively.

On the occasion of the conference, Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Director, will give one of 35 talks to be given over the course of the two-day conference. Specifically, Professor Ferrari’s talk will address “Transnationalism and Its Impact on the Law Applicable to the Merits”. Professor Friedrich Rosenfeld, Global Adjunct Professor at NYU Paris, will speak on “The New York Convention as an Instrument of Uniform Law”.

For the full program, please click here.

On 9 and 10 November 2023, the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law will host, together with Columbia Law School and the Arbitration Channel,  the 2^nd conference on “Arbitration in 2 Worlds” focusing on peculiarities of the Brazilian and the US arbitration regimes. On this occasion, the Center’s Director, Professor Franco Ferrari, will give the closing address titled “Limits to Party Autonomy in International Commercial Arbitration”, based on a recent publication co-authored by Professor Ferrari with Professor Friedrich Rosenfeld (published in the Cambridge Compendium of International Commercial and Investment Arbitration (2023), a three volume publication co-edited by Professor Ferrari).

For the full program of the two-day event, please click here.

The Center is glad to announce that, together with SciencesPo Law School, Queen Mary University of London, and National University of Singapore Law, it will host once again the Cross-Examination Moot. The Cross-Examination Moot, which won the Award for the Best Development in Arbitration in 2022, is a competition for university teams with an exclusive focus on cross-examination techniques in international arbitration. Students will attend various rounds of hearings during which they will cross-examine each other’s witnesses and experts (https://www.crossmoot.com/). This year’s edition, to take place from November 4^th – 8^th, 2023, in Paris, will be held on the premises of SciencesPo Law School.

For more information regarding the schedule and venue of the Cross-Examination Moot, please click here.

The Center will also host a conference titled “Exceptionalism in International Arbitration”. The event, co-hosted by SciencesPo Law School and the Arbitration Academy and to be held on Wednesday, November 8^th, 2023, also at SciencesPo Law School, is divided into two parts, addressing exceptionalism in the pre-award and post-award stages, respectively.

The first part will be moderated by Carine Dupeyron, while the speakers will be Carole Malinvaud, Professor Francesca Ragno, Professors Loukas Mistelis, and Rafael Alves.

The speakers tackling exceptionalism in the post-award stage will be Professors Caroline Kleiner, Friedrich Rosenfeld, Juan Ignacio Stampalija, and Mariana França Gouveia. This panel will be moderated by Fabienne Schaller.

Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Director, will give the introductory remarks, while Professor Diego P. Fernández Arroyo will give the closing remarks.

For more information, please click here.