Eric E. Bergsten

The Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot and the Teaching of International Commercial Arbitration

HOW TO teach international commercial arbitration depends largely on who is to be taught and the purpose for which they are being taught. Teaching business students about arbitration because they should know something about the resolution of business disputes would normally call for a different educational technique than would teaching young lawyers who have entered a firm that engages in international commercial arbitration. A moot arbitration is one method of teaching about arbitration and the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot has become the most important of them. The Willem C Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot has as its primary audience law students, who act as counsel for the parties in the moot arbitration. The student participants need not be working on a first degree in law. Many of them are working on an LL.M. or doctoral degree. What is important is that they are still students and not practitioners. A considerably smaller audience is composed of business students. Yet a third category who learn about arbitration from the Moot are young law graduates who participate as arbitrator, though not as counsel. The Moot involves a dispute arising out of an international contract of sale subject to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). The dispute is to be settled by arbitration in Danubia, which has adopted the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. All relevant states are party to the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. The relevant arbitration rules rotate among the sponsoring arbitral organisations. The Moot that culminated with the oral arguments in March 2005 used the Swiss Rules of International Arbitration. The Moot in 2005–2006 will use the arbitration rules of the Chicago International Dispute Resolution Association. A full list of sponsoring organisations, along …

Commentary: Investment and Dispute Resolution

FIRST OF all, I am a law professor rather than a practitioner. So, many of my comments will be more general and will avoid advice regarding how you should do things. In our scenario, we saw a case where we have an ICC arbitration clause with Local Power and the Province of Punt. That, too, would have been an arbitration with a sovereign raising somewhat different problems than the kinds of problems that come up under the BIT. I will not say anything more about it, but will mention simply that it is a more familiar type of arbitration clause. It is interesting that in our scenario there was no reliance on the BIT when the investment was made. The BIT was not in existence. We assume that there are certain things the investor and lawyer should mink about and that the lawyers should be thinking about when such a major investment is being made. Certainly, the possibility of arbitration is among these issues for the lawyers. However, one wonders how often the businesspeople who are making the decision as to whether the investment will be made really worry about many of these things. If they relied on the possibility of arbitration at all in this investment, they relied …