In her blog post on 27 February 2022, Kiran Nasir Gore expressed measured optimism regarding the international arbitration (IA) community’s collective progress towards greater diversity especially over the last few years. She highlighted various recent initiatives and developments including Racial Equality for Arbitration Lawyers (REAL), the Rising Arbitrators Initiative (RAI) and the appointment of first…

Ex aequo et bono1)The author is grateful to Professors Leon Trakman and Luke Nottage for their comment on early drafts of this blog article.This blog post is based on the author’s PhD thesis. is a legal concept that confers on arbitrators the power to decide a dispute in accordance with their sense of fairness and…

Not long after the ICCA Congress held in Sydney, the Japan International Dispute Resolution Center (JIDRC) was established in Osaka on 1 May 2018, with some fanfare from the Japanese government and local legal circles. ‘JIDRC-Osaka’ does not provide arbitration services but offers specialist facilities for international arbitration hearings and other forms of Alternative Dispute Resolution…

With some fanfare, on the sidelines of the ICCA Congress hosted in Sydney over 15-18 April, the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) unveiled a glossy brochure entitled “Australia’s Capability in International Commercial Arbitration”. This blog posting explains its key contents, identifying both convincing and unconvincing aspects. Our later blog posting will compare Japan as…