Arbitration: Law, Practice & Politics

Catalog description

Arbitration, once narrowly defined as a party-selected method for resolving contract-based disputes arising out of commercial transactions, is now ubiquitous. In the U.S. in addition to resolving run-of the-mill commercial disputes, arbitration may be used to resolve claims invoking anti-trust, securities, and civil rights law, and consumers, employees, patients and other individual claimants may be held to arbitration provisions included in form contracts drafted by corporations that the individuals overlooked or barely understood. Businesses too may find themselves held to an arbitration clause hastily chosen by a transactional lawyer who didn't understand what she was committing her client to. Economic globalization has created increased demand for international commercial arbitration, which offers binding resolution of trans-national business disputes, enforceable in virtually every court in the world. The increased frequency of complex high-value international transactions involving key industries -- e.g. energy and telecommunications -- has led to an increasing fraction of transnational business disputes with a significant public policy dimension. Moreover, the desires of countries with less developed economies to attract foreign direct investment has led to the creation of a specialized form of arbitration for disputes between private investors and states. Often bundled with other forms of alternative dispute resolution ("ADR") such as mediation, arbitration is actually a rule-defined adjudicative procedure, in which parties submit their disputes to privately-chosen and privately-paid decision-makers who deliver binding (and usually unappealable) outcomes, often in closed proceedings. The law that governs arbitration is a mix of domestic statutes (e.g., in the U.S., the Federal Arbitration Act) and international conventions (e.g., the New York Convention on…