Friday, January 14, 2011

Ferrari & Kröll: Conflict of Laws in International Arbitration

Franco Ferrari & Stefan Kröll have published Conflict of Laws in International Arbitration (Sellier 2010). Here's the abstract:
Irrespective of the increasing harmonization of law at the transnational level, every arbitration raises a number of conflict of laws problems relating to procedural questions as well as to issues concerning the merits of the case. Unlike a state court judge, the arbitrator has no "lex fori" in the proper sense providing the relevant conflict rules to determine the applicable law. This raises the question of what conflict of laws rules to apply and, consequently, of the extent of the freedom the arbitrator enjoys in dealing with this and related issues. The best example of the importance of conflict of laws questions in arbitration is the Vivendi-Elektrim saga where the outcome of the various proceedings depended on the question of characterization.