Paolo Vargiu

As an academic lawyer, keeping up can sometimes feel impossible. Legal developments churn out at a pace that rivals London’s rush hour, and alongside them is the relentless stream of academic discourse online and in person. Papers, panels, journal articles, social media posts, webinars - every bit of it carrying an air of urgency, as if missing out might spell professional doom. At some point this past term I’ve started to wonder how much of it really matters. It’s not that I don’t care about the law or my work - quite the opposite: I define myself as an academic, to the point that losing use of 75% of my body wasn’t as much a trauma as it usually is for other winners of the spinal cord injury lottery, because I could keep doing what I love without too many adjustments. 1 But trying to stay ahead of every new decision, every article that might be tangentially related to my niche, and every panel discussion hosted in some far-flung time zone often feels less like intellectual enrichmen...

 It's Christmas, I have ten spare minutes per day, and I'm re-reading a few classics. John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is the one I've just finished, roughly 20 years after my first rodeo, and it has sparked some reflections on disability discrimination (I was a fully abled biped the first time I read it, and my perspective was understandably different). It's a classic, so the following synopsis is more for my own benefit should I ever actually get to write this paper than for anyone else's. The book revolves around the story of two itinerant labourers, George Milton and Lennie Small, who harbour a shared dream of attaining independence through land ownership. Lennie is a man with a cognitive disability, and he depends on George for guidance and protection. However, this relationship is rendered tragic by society's lack of understanding and accommodation for Lennie’s condition. While much has been written about Steinbeck’s commentary on marginalisation, friends...

 For fifteen years, I have resisted the siren call of the written lecture. Not out of laziness or disdain for preparation, but out of principle: from the moment I first stood in front of a classroom clutching a remote for a PowerPoint presentation, I always believed that the alchemy of a good lecture was not in the script, but in the delivery. I honed my craft during my PhD years, taking perhaps one too many public speaking workshop and eventually teaching some myself. It became clear to me that the essence of teaching was not in reading from a page, but in the living act of storytelling. Slides became my scaffolding, more detailed when the subject matter was unfamiliar, sparser and more evocative when it was well within my wheelhouse. The classroom became a sort of a stage, and at times I acted as equal parts scholar and raconteur (whether I was any good at the latter should be a question for my former students). This approach has served me well: over the years, I have relished th...

A new academic year is starting tomorrow and for some unclear reason I am feeling thrilled. Obviously, what is getting my blood pumping is not the prospect of teaching per se – that can be amazing, obviously, but after a few years it becomes too familiar a feeling to be a source of excitement – but rather the necessary structure and discipline it demands. I figured out, over the years, that summer may not be the most productive time of the year for me, writing-wise. I certainly have much more time in my hands than during teaching terms, but I also realised that open-ended mornings and afternoons make for fantastic reading slots – not so much for writing. Teaching brings with itself a schedule, non-negotiable commitments, and a sense of urgency: if I want to write until my class at 3 pm, I must get to it as soon as possible, which means that I have to deal with emails, administration and other less-than-interesting tasks quickly so that I have that coveted couple of hours to write. The ...

After a year-long hiatus, punctuated with a pleasant period of study leave and a harrowing few months on sick leave, I finally find myself, once again, in the familiar role of coaching my students for the Vis Moot. It is an endeavour that evokes ambivalence, akin to reuniting with an old friend who, while cherished, demands considerable time and energy. But let me be honest - how have I missed it! From an external perspective, the duties of a coach might seem limited to steering students through simulated legal proceedings, be it in an English courtroom or an American-style arbitration. Yet those who take part in a moot court, be they coaches or mooters, recognize its deeper essence. While the foundation undoubtedly lies in legal preparation and the students' professional growth, my emphasis - and the sentiment I strive to impart - transcends these bounds. When I speak to the new Vis Moot students, the first thing I try to stress upon is the fact that lawyers, and mooters, do not j...

As an educator, I am always pondering my teaching methods and questioning whether they are adequate for my students' growth. I have recently revisited Karl Llewellyn's " The Bramble Bush ", a book that had a profound impact on my intellectual and academic development. In the very first pages, Llewellyn demystifies the legend that the study of law is (or could be) limited to learning the rules. His words made me consider my own teaching, and how much of it is reliant on the shortcut of simply paraphrasing the rules. While teaching jurisprudence, I can easily avoid using specific provisions, except for rudimentary examples when necessary, and prioritize instead instilling the underlying principles in my students. Similarly, when it comes to teaching investment law, I have found that focusing on specific treaty rules may prove futile. Although the rules may be virtually the same across different treaties, the diversity in their interpretation by tribunals renders them un...

Having had to spend the better part of last year on bed rest, I had considerable time to devote to researching and writing about the protection of places of worship under international law. While my article, soon to be published in Ephemerides Iuris Canonici , briefly touched upon a rather thought-provoking question on whether places of worship could also be considered as religious symbols, I was unable to delve into it due to constraints of space and coherence. However, peer-reviewers, colleagues, and even myself (if I can immodestly say so) recognized it as one of the most interesting aspects of the article. After submitting the final draft, the question continued to nag at me, prompting me to embark on a new side-project. While I have only drafted an extended abstract and shared it with a few colleagues, their insightful feedback has raised numerous pertinent questions, which could potentially take a decade to fully explore. Nevertheless, I am confident that this is a worthwhile res...

This is the text of a talk delivered at "International law, conflict and disabilities: How do international conflicts affect disabled people?", webinar organized by Bringing [Dis]Ability to the Bar and Goldsmith Chambers on 29 March 2022. It briefly raises questions about how international law can protect persons with disabilities in post-conflict areas, with particular reference to Ukraine. First of all, I would like to thank Bringing my (Dis)Ability to the Bar and Goldsmith Chambers for organizing the event, and for inviting me to join the discussion. Even though Russia's invasion of Ukraine rightly monopolizes information spaces on traditional and new media, the space given to minority problems, which are exacerbated by the ongoing conflict, remains minimal, if not entirely absent, and events like this are fundamental for remembering which problems arise during a conflict, and which ones are ready to emerge as soon as the conflict ends. With my speech I intend to focu...

Should the law follow the practice, or should the practice abide to the law? Although the answer to this provocative question may seem obvious (what is the value of a practice that does not comply with the law after all?), the question of the impartiality of the arbitrators and its treatment in domestic legislation requires further reflection. In a previous post I wrote about how, sometimes, the analysis of arbitral proceedings by judges, accustomed to dealing with rather different subjects, does not reflect the actual practice of a country or a professional sector, but rather its textbook version – as such, purified from its local peculiarities and sterilized from any cultural influences. As we have learned from our interviews, there are countries – especially in Northern Europe – in which the concepts of independence and impartiality of the arbitrators are to be considered in its absolute sense – that is, the link between an arbitrator and the party that appointed them consists mere...

Strictly speaking, the European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter referred to as “ECHR”) does not include a specific provision aimed at protecting religious minorities. The relevant provisions are indeed Article 9 (Freedom of thought, conscience and religion) and 14 (Prohibition of discrimination); and while neither provision explicitly deals with religious minorities, the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights (hereinafter “ECtHR” or, simply, “the Court”) shows that the two provisions are in fact to be interpreted jointly and broadly. Article 9 not only provides for the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, but also the ‘freedom to change [one’s] religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest [their] religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance’; and such freedoms may be limited only ‘as […] prescribed by law and […] necessary in a democratic society in the interests of p...

In a blog post of a few months ago , I questioned the international character of international commercial arbitration in light of the distinctive features of arbitration that emerged, at the national level, from our interviews. Indeed, the term "international commercial arbitration", in legal jargon, indicates a form of arbitration described in the most used teaching handbooks. Such form of arbitration, however, is characterized not only by the international character of the dispute, but also by a number of procedural aspects, principles and interpretative practices that are, in fact, specific of a minority of arbitration proceedings heard by a relatively small and exclusive group of practitioners, and mostly run in the main commercial arbitration hubs - especially Paris, London, Stockholm, Milan, Geneva, and New York. Together with this minority of high-profile cases, the realm of arbitration is widely populated by a large majority of international and domestic proceedings i...

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...