On October 31, Paris Arbitration hosted a conference on the choice of Paris as the seat in international arbitration, and its far-reaching implications. The conference, taking place in the heart of Paris, featured a star-studded line-up of distinguished experts including a keynote address delivered by Claudia Salomon, President of the ICC International Court of Arbitration,…

For a judge to know the law may seem as obviously desirable as for a cook to know something of food. What goes for judges ought here to go for arbitrators. After all, overwhelmingly, parties choose lawyers as arbitrators in preference to industry or financial experts, for example. Yet say it in Latin and you…

How is the content of laws determined, and by whom, in international commercial arbitration? This topic mainly concerns an old legal assumption: iura novit curia, the Latin legal maxim for “the court knows the law”. While somewhat reasonable and predictable on the face of it since anyone can reasonably expect the court to know the…

and Katherine Bell, Schellenberg Wittmer In decision 4A_554/2014 dated 15 April 2015, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court considered an application to set aside an award on the ground of violation of the right to be heard where the sole arbitrator had based her award on a legal concept that had not been explicitly pleaded by…