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Law of International Business and Dispute Settlement in the 21 Century
R. Briner et.al, Law of International Business and Dispute Settlement in the 21 Century - Liber Amicorum for Karl-Heinz Boeckstiegel, 200 Euros
Karl-Heinz Boeckstiegel, Professor at the University of Cologne, is one of the leading authorities on international arbitration, both as a practitioner and an academic. He was president of the US-Iran Claims Tribunal (and known for an energetic and fair exercise of his role), of the London Court of International Arbitration and president as well as founder of the German Arbitration Institute (DIS). He enjoys an international reputation for decades of successful arbitration practice, but also for creating academic institutions at the University of Cologne focusing on international contract design, arbitration and space and sport law. Boeckstiegel combined both public international economic law and private/comparative law with a strong emphasis on international commercial practice - an approach that builds a bridge between the usually very distinct disciplines of international public law and international, or better transnational, economic/ commercial law. This book - a "Festschrift" - is dedicated to him. Its contributors include many if not most of the leaders of this profession mainly from Europe (including England) and in particular the German-speaking countries.
It is usually difficult to review a Festschrift, as contributions tend to be on all sorts of unrelated topics. Festschrift contributors tend to be either students and academic colleagues, or senior co-equal colleagues of the thus honoured scholar. Thematically focused edited books with strong quality control tend to be more attractive in particular if the editor(s) manage to select (invite, encourage, persuade, cajole, pressure) both senior scholars and practitioners and young and promising scholars to to get the best out of such contributors arranged around a focused and consistent intellectual architecture of the work. Contributions a "Festschrift", however, tend to be written rather rapidly by busy, senior people - as a result they are usually not distinguished by their intellectual depth and originality, but rather by the virtue of constituting an authoritative, but brief "survey of the field" by an eminent scholar. They will also rely on current work - legal opinions, arbitral awards, conference presentations, pleadings out of the "workshop" of the contributors. Busy senior law firm partners may at times look towards their assistants and associates to deliver something. A weakness of such works where both the editors and the contributor feels they have to contribute, even if they have little time or material to contribute, is that there is usually a certain amount of re-publication. Festschrift contributors rather contribute what they want to contribute and can contribute relatively easily than what a thematically focused editor would like them to do.
This book is a combination of both a conventional "Festschrift" and a thematically focused edited book. The outstanding profile of Professor Boeckstiegel as international arbitrator must have helped to get this collection reasonably focused on the international arbitration theme. I can not list here the table of contents, but among the English-language contributions I have noted "Pro-Active Arbitration" (Aksen), an issue which some would feel is inherently contradictory, but raises important questions to what extent arbitration has become much more like normal litigation rather than in the older tradition a more informal settlement procedure with some similarities to mediation. Berger discusses the 1998 German Arbitration Law (also on this Van den Berg) and its first experiences. Bernhardini provides a conventional discussion of state contracts - see my review of this contribution to the 1996 book by Robert Pritchard (Robert Pritchard (Ed) Economic Development, Foreign Investment and the Law Kluwer 1996 - in www.cepmlp.org/journal). Briner/Schlabrendorff deal with the interesting implication of Art. 6 of the ECHR (due process - fair trial) on arbitration. Cremades on the for arbitration doctrine challenging question if the direct acceptance of arbitration in modern investment treaties constitutes a contractual "offer". Fortier, Giardina, Park and Derains discuss the tension between arbitration and judicial recognition/enforcement., Grigera Naon ICC arbitration in Latin America. Guenther (regrettably in German) the interesting question concerning the application of - public - competition law by arbitral tribunals. Applicable law is discussed by Schuetze.There are a number of interesting comments on specialized arbitration: Horn on banking, Herrmann, Malanczuk and Kaufmann-Koehler on e-commerce, Kerr and Komarov discuss developments in Russia and England, Hunter an issue of investment arbitration (Art. 1128 of the NAFTA). Mariott suggests mediation. Several contributors (not all in English) discuss procedural issues of arbitration: experts (Loercher), agreement on the place of arbitration (Lionnet), confidentiality (Pruetting). There are also more personalized accounts on style, method and particular cases: Paulsson on the Boeckstiegel method, Shihata on the creation of Miga, Lalive on "raison d'etat" and Veeder on the famous "Indonesian arbitrator abduction" case.
It is hard to do proper justice to the 58 contributions. I have found most of the contributions which interested me to provide considerable insight in current practice and thinking in the quite closed Euro-German arbitration community. This massive "liber amicorum" does not replace an up to date treaties on international commercial arbitration as a general look-up tool. But it is most useful as a running commentary on current developments by in the main experienced practitioners with often an intellectual interest in conceptualizing their professional practice. The book does not provide evidence of tight editorial management. It looks more like the collation of intelligent comments and insights in a professional, collegial and convivial conference. Given that international commercial arbitration is now largely conducted and analysed in English and has a claim to a cosmopolitan culture, I would have expected that all contributions, and not only some, were written in English. But for anybody with a serious interest in particular European perspectives on contemporary questions of international commercial arbitration this books is highly recommended.
