On 25 and 26 August 2022, the Center for Transnational Litigation, Arbitration, and Commercial Law hosted, together with Columbia Law School and the Arbitration Channel, a conference on “Arbitration in 2 Worlds” focusing on peculiarities of the Brazilian and the US arbitration regimes. On that occasion, the Center’s Director, Professor Franco Ferrari, gave the keynote address entitled “National International Commercial Arbitration”, based on a recent publication of his (32 Am. Rev. Int’l Arb. 439 (2022), available here). In this address, Professor Ferrari highlighted the importance played by national arbitration laws and their many differences. This lead Professor Ferrari to state that the differences in the various national arbitration regimes, which may apply during an arbitration’s life cycle, do not allow one to speak of a uniform concept of “international commercial arbitration” subject to a uniform regime, although there are, of course, very many common traits in each international commercial arbitration. It is therefore correct to state, as one commentator had just done in the Handbook of International Arbitration, that “such label[s] do not do justice to the complexities of arbitration law and convey an impression of uniformity that does not correspond to reality”.
The video of Professor Ferrari’s keynote is now available on the Arbitration Channel’s YouTube channel.