Paolo Vargiu

The assessment of international commercial arbitration on the basis of the various practitioners’ communities is a fascinating exercise. What is studied in universities is soon revealed to be a rather peculiar version of international commercial arbitration – one that, for the most part, only exists in textbooks, and involves a relatively small circle of practitioners and a few high-profile cases. International commercial arbitration, however, is a large and lively universe, the diversity of which raises the question on whether there is such thing as “international” commercial arbitration, or whether there are some common principles informing what is in fact a commercial dispute settlement mechanism declined differently in the various countries that offer it in some form. “International commercial arbitration” is a term that technically defines an arbitral dispute between parties of different nationalities based on a contract with a transnational element. Such transnationality is a fer...

Among the various requirements to sit in an arbitral panel, impartiality is certainly one of the quintessential. Students of international commercial arbitration are often told in their first lecture that arbitrators must be and remain independent and impartial, and most arbitration rules include the requirement of impartiality of arbitrators in some form, whether explicit or implicitly (see e.g. UNCITRAL Rules 2010, Art. 12; ICC Rules 2012, Art. 14(1); ICDR Rules, Art. 8(1); HKIAC Rules, Art. 11(4); LCIA Rules, Art. 10(1) and (3); CIETAC Rules 2012, Art. 29(2); SIAC Rules 2010, Art. 11(1)). The said rules, however, seldom provide for any proper indication of what the parties should expect from the arbitrators, especially those they appointed, in terms of impartiality. According to Redfern and Hunter (p. 254) 'the concept of "impartiality" is considered to be connected with actual 4.78 or apparent bias of an arbitrator - either in favour of one of the parties, or in relat...

This entry has been originally posted in the University of Bristol Law School Blog as part of the IEL Collective Symposium II - Disrupting Narratives on International Economic Law: Theory, Pedagogy and Practice ; I’m re-posting it here for archival purposes. Roland Barthes was never particularly interested in the law. Were he alive today, however, it is hard to imagine that he would be a strong supporter of a regime like investment arbitration – a system which, in spite of its best original intentions, has long been exposed by its critics for the lack of balance in rights and obligations and the abuse of the mechanism to increase the already disproportionate power of multinational corporations vis-à-vis the state where they invest. However, his literary production can nonetheless serve as a model for inquiring on aspects of the investment arbitral regime that remain somehow at the margins of the scholarly critique. In his essay “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” (1971), Barthes the...

With the 27th edition of the Vis Moot under way (and the 10th in which I am involved as coach and arbitrator), it has only taken five days for my annual interaction with a colleague asking me why I coach our Vis Moot team, and what is the point. Indeed, at first glance it may seem counter-productive: the University gives me 16 hours per term to coach the team, and I usually spend 20 hours in the first two weeks of preparation - which means that I basically take time off research or rest to coach the team; if (rectius, when) we do not win I am responsible, but the credit for any success goes to the students (and rightly so); I am not a PhD student and I do not need to go to Vienna with a team to enlarge my network - at this point in my career, I pretty much know who I need to know and I can be introduced to those I do not, and my yearly trip to Vienna is sufficiently justified by the desire to watch my team competing, arbitrating one or two good teams, and ingest as many wienerschnitzel...

(Last Updated on 29 September 2019) Just like anyone employed in a research position at a University, I receive my fair share of weekly questions and unsolicited projects from prospective PhD applicants. I reply to each email out of courtesy, as it is very rare for one of these emails to pick my interest. It is not a snobbish approach - in fact, anecdotal evidence (I have just asked 10 of my colleagues, randomly chosen) suggests that my average is rather high. The reason for this is, predictably, that most of these requests can be placed on a spectrum, at one extreme of which is the dramatically naïve proposal, which is months of work away from being interesting, and at the other is the completely irrelevant one (and I am not talking about something on a field of international law I do not even teach - I am referring to proposals in criminal law, equity and trusts, land law or any other subject I have not seen since I was an undergraduate student, if ever). There are colleagues who lau...