International arbitrations take place within a complex and vitally-important international legal framework. As summarized in this introductory chapter, contemporary international conventions, national arbitration legislation, and institutional arbitration rules provide a specialized and highly-supportive enforcement regime for most contemporary international commercial arbitrations and international investment arbitrations. A significantly less detailed legal . . . Read more

It is elementary that international arbitration is consensual: without an agreement to arbitrate, of some sort, there can be no arbitration.1 At the same time, the terms of the parties’ arbitration agreement play a central role in defining the character of any arbitration, including the arbitral proceedings, and in producing . . . Read more

The formation and validity of international arbitration agreements are of vital importance to the arbitral process. Both issues arise in many international arbitration cases and can have a decisive impact on the course of arbitral proceedings. This chapter provides an overview of issues relating to the formation and validity of . . . Read more

Under the New York Convention, other international arbitration instruments, and most national arbitration regimes, parties enjoy broad autonomy to draft international arbitration agreements in the fashion they desire. The parties’ autonomy inevitably produces a wide range of different arbitration agreements. Arbitration clauses can be very short (a few words) or . . . Read more

As we have seen, virtually all international and national legal regimes regard arbitration as consensual and provide that only the parties to an arbitration agreement are obliged to comply with that agreement.1 In most cases, the parties to an arbitration agreement are—and are only—the entities that executed the underlying contract . . . Read more