Professor Ferrari, the Director of the Center, and Dr. Friedrich Rosenfeld, a former scholar-in-residence at the Center and currently a Global Adjunct Professor at NYU Law in Paris, a Visiting Professor at the International Hellenic University in Thessaloniki and Lecturer at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, have just published a paper in Spanish on “Limits to Party Autonomy in International Arbitration”. The English language abstract reads as follows: The paper examines the limitations to party autonomy in international commercial arbitration. As such, it challenges the liberalist premise that arbitration is purely a dyadic process between two rational parties based on an expression of party autonomy. The authors submit that arbitration creates a web of relationships involving the parties, the arbitrators, arbitral institutions, and the public at large. While the interests of these different stakeholders overlap in some cases, they diverge in others, thus creating tensions that at times can only be solved by limiting party autonomy. Against this background, the authors develop a taxonomy of limitations by distinguishing between limitations to party autonomy in the interest of the parties, the arbitrators, arbitral institutions as well as the public at large. It is the authors’ position that a clear understanding of these limitations is necessary to protect arbitration against legitimacy challenges and to uphold its role as the primary instrument for the resolution of business disputes.
