A big thank you to everyone who responded to our inaugural poll!  We’ve dusted off our calculators, put on our stats hats and prepared some charts and analysis for you.  But first, here’s a quick backgrounder: Our first poll asked participants to rate three different potential reasons for the long-standing under-representation of women in arbitration:…

Over the summer, I read two discussions that gave some fascinating, albeit wholly depressing statistics about women arbitrators.  The first was a great discussion initiated by Lucy Greenwood of Fulbright & Jaworski on the OGEMID listserv, which noted that only 6.5% of all commercial arbitrator appointments (both party appointments and institutional appointments) are of women.1)Ms….

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently issued a decision that has some interesting implications for the enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in the U.S. against foreign state agencies or state-owned companies. American readers, get ready for a review of Civil Procedure 101 on personal jurisdiction! The United States…

What makes an international arbitrator different from a national judge? All of us in the arbitration world have a pretty solid answer to this question. At what point do the distinctions between an international arbitrator and an international judge melt away? That’s a bit of a trickier question, depending on the case. With the increase…

As World Bank protests go, today’s was a pretty mild one. This afternoon, a group of labor and environmental activists huddled outside World Bank headquarters in DC to protest the on-going Pacific Rim v. El Salvador CAFTA arbitration, complete with a giant balloon of a sinister corporate-looking orange cat, an ensemble of guitarists, and panels…

Arbitration practitioners have traditionally had very little illumination into the outcomes, let alone the reasoning, of arbitrator challenge decisions. Few arbitral institutions set out in writing to the parties the reasons for their challenge decisions, and even fewer institutions have made these decisions available to the larger arbitration community. Past posts on this blog have…

A few years ago, stabilization clauses in investment contracts became the subject of increased attention by human rights and development groups. A report on Stabilization Clauses and Human Rights, issued by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Business and Human Rights, John Ruggie, was the first comprehensive study to draw on a range of heretofore…

As discussed by Paul Friedlandhere, on September 12, 2011, the International Chamber of Commerce issued its revisedRules of Arbitration. The new rules, which update the 1998 Rules and will take effect on January 1, 2012, are the result of a two-year effort by a special task force that gathered input and consolidated best practices from…