Professor Franco Ferrari, the Center’s Director, has just published the lectures on “Forum Shopping Despite Unification of Law” he gave during the summer 2019 session at the Hague Academy of International Law. The lectures, to which the entire volume 413 of the Recueil des cours is dedicated, show that forum shopping is ubiquitous in international commercial law and that this also holds true in respect of international commercial law stemming from uniform substantive law conventions. The lectures show that despite statements to the contrary, these conventions are unable to prevent forum shopping for many different reasons, both convention-extrinsic and convention-intrinsic. The convention-extrinsic reasons are reasons independent of the specific uniform substantive law convention which may be applicable in a given case. There are and will always be reasons for forum shopping that uniform substantive law conventions will not have any impact upon, such as the potential bias of the adjudicator or the costs of access to justice, just to name a few which were addressed in the lectures. As for the many convention-intrinsic reasons discussed in the lectures, Professor Ferrari asserts that no drafting efforts will be able to do away with them. Ultimately, this means that forum shopping is here to stay, despite the unification of substantive law through conventions. The lectures also show that this is not necessarily a bad thing, because forum shopping as defined in the lectures is not the evil commentators make it out to be.
