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.