Write On! Dispute resolution

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers)

Papers are being sought for a works-in-progress conference to held at the University of Missouri School of Law in Columbia on on October 21, 2011 -- the day before a symposium at which speakers from Europe and North America will discuss international dispute resolution. Keynote lecturer at the October 20 conference, entitled Border Skirmishes: The Intersection Between Litigation and International Commercial Arbitration, will be international arbitration expert Gary Born (WilmerHale); among others scheduled to speak are Louise Reilly (Court of Arbitration for Sport), Marianne Roth (Salzburg), and the convener, Stacie I. Strong (Missouri).
Submissions for the concomitant works-in-progress conference should bear some relationship to international commercial arbitration, transnational litigation, or the connection between the two. Deadline for works-in-progress proposals is May 20, 2011. (There's also a student writing contest.)
Details on all events here.

Go On! ASIL midyear in Miami

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

Next month the American Society of International Law will break from a long D.C. tradition and hold its 2010 Midyear Meeting in Miami, Florida. Of the plan to meet November 12 and 13 in that southernmost city, ASIL President David D. Caron explained:

Convening the international law community throughout the United States and the rest of the world is an important priority for the Society — to serve our far-flung members, and also to reach growing new constituencies of international law within the bar and the judiciary, among representatives of the media, and in the general public.

As they do every autumn, ASIL's Executive Council and the editors of the American Journal of International Law will gather. Additionally, those of us who are working on ASIL's Benchbook on International Law project look forward to the opportunity to vet drafts with a panel of federal judges.

Newly supplementing in camera sessions like these will be a day of events open to the public (many offering Continuing Legal Education credit). Examples of public events for Friday, November 12, at the University of Miami Robert and Judi Prokop Newman Alumni Center:

► "Stop the Hand-Wringing and Do Something: Solutions on the Table to What is Perceived to be Wrong with International Arbitration," featuring: Catherine Amirfar (Debevoise & Plimpton LLP); Edward Mullins (Astigarraga Davis LLP); and Michael Reisman (Yale Law). Chaired by IntLawGrrl Lucy Reed (Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP), ASIL's Immediate Past President.

► "The Top Six Recent Arbitrations Everyone Should Know," featuring: Mahnoush Arsanjani (International Law Associates), an ASIL Vice President; David Bederman (Emory Law); Ryan Reetz (Squire Sanders LLP). Chaired by Donald Francis Donovan (Debevoise & Plimpton LLP).
► Luncheon keynote, "Florida and the Globalization of the Legal Profession: Insights from the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20," by Carolyn Lamm (White & Case LLP) (above left), Immediate Past President of the American Bar Association.

► "Career Fair/Mentoring Session for Students"

► "Revisiting the Place of International Law in Domestic Law," featuring: Judge Rosemary Barkett (U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit) (right); Judge Adalberto Jordan (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida); Curtis Bradley (Duke Law); and Eyal Benvenisti (Tel Aviv Law); chaired by Laurence Helfer (Duke Law).
► "National, Regional, and International Perspectives on International Criminal Accountability," featuring: Olivia Swaak-Goldman (Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court); and Dinah Shelton (George Washington Law) (below left), a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Chaired by yours truly, IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann (University of California, Davis, Law), an ASIL Vice President.

All participants also are welcome to register for the conference dinner that evening at the Biltmore Hotel; featured will be "Justice and Leadership Dilemmas in Shakespeare," the keynote by Judge Theodor Meron, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and ASIL Honorary President.

Events are free for students, ASIL members, and affiliates of the meeting's cosponsoring law firms and law schools; for others, there is a fee. Details and registration here.

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

This is an especially important finding of the Tribunal which reinforces the binding nature of international law. Under the cardinal principle of pacta sunt servanda (Article 27 [of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties]), a State is normally prohibited from referring to its internal legislation to justify its failure to perform. In applying this principle, the Tribunal concluded that allowing Russia to 'modulate (or, as the may be, eliminate) the obligation of provisional application, depending on the content of its internal law in relation to the specific provisions found in the Treaty, would undermine the principle that provisional application of the treaty creates binding obligations.'

-- Dr. Chiara Giorgetti (right), attorney at White & Case in Washington, Georgetown Law adjunct, and Co-Chair of the International Courts and Tribunals Interest Group of the American Society of International Law, in an ASIL Insight. Georgetti analyzed the Interim Award on Jurisdiction and Admissibility (2009), issued by an arbitral panel in Yukos Universal Ltd. (UK – Isle of Man) v. Russian Federation, an investment dispute alleged to involve $100 billion in losses as a result of the 2006 bankruptcy of Yukos, once Russia's largest oil company. At issue was the duty of a signing (but not ratifying) state, Russia, to adhere to the terms of a treaty even before it enters into force -- in this case, the multilateral Energy Charter Treaty (logo above left). As Georgetti affirms, the panel's finding of duty, in a situation that in other contexts has prompted "unsigning" -- would seem to have the potential for far reach.

On April 28

On this day in ...
... 1838, the namesake of a Dutch research consortium familiar to international lawyers all over -- Tobias Michael Carel Asser (left) -- was born in Amsterdam into a family of jurists. He himself became a lawyer, then began teaching law, and eventually devoted himself to international law as a professor at what became the University of Amsterdam. His belief that interstate dialogue would serve global peace led him to spearhead a number of landmark private and public international law conferences at The Hague. Asser also served as a governmental legal adviser and diplomat, inter alia as the Dutch delegate to the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (prior posts here and here), and he was an inaugural member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. On account of these contributions, Asser shared the 1911 Nobel Peace Prize; he died in 1913 at The Hague. In 1965, the law faculties of universities in Amsterdam, Groningen, Leiden, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, Tilburg, and Utrecht founded the Hague-based T.M.C. Asser Instituut in his name.


(Prior April 28 posts are here, here, and here)

Go On! "International Dispute Resolution"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) Current challenges to global resolution of disagreements will be explored in an all-day conference this Friday at my home institution, the University of California, Davis, School of Law. Entitled Overhauling International Dispute Resolution: Challenges & Potential Solutions to International Dispute Resolution in the 21st Century, the symposium will examine the following panel topics:
► The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes Revisited: Evaluating the Effectiveness of the 2006 Amendments to ICSID Arbitration Rules;
► Alternative Dispute Resolution and Corporate America: The Evolution of the Use of ADR Among Fortune 1000 Companies; and
► Lessons from International and Domestic Conflict Resolution: The New Face of Arbitration.
Chief sponsor of the conference is the law school's Journal of International Law & Policy, an Affiliate of our new California International Law Center at King Hall. Advising JILP editors are my colleagues, Afra Afsharipour and Andrea K. Bjorklund, herself an IntLawGrrls guest/alumna.
Conference details and brochure available here.

... and ask 'em about Iran, too.

And yet another transnational case (arising, like the whales case above, out of a Ninth Circuit judgment) added to the Court's docket for next Term. Here's SCOTUS blog's description of the case, which involves an agency of the government of Iran (flag below right):

The Court granted the appeal of Iran’s Defense Ministry, testing the power of U.S. courts to order a seizure of the assets in the U.S. of a foreign government that has been accused of aiding terrorism, with the assets to be used to pay a debt owed in the U.S. The Solicitor General, asked by the Court for the government’s views, suggested that the Ninth Circuit Court be told to reconsider its ruling on the foreign agency’s challenge to seizure of the proceeds of an arbitration award it had won. The case will be heard later this year; it is Iran Ministry of Defense v. Elahi (07-615).

Welcome newest IntLawGrrl Lucy Reed

Honored to welcome Lucy Reed (left), installed last month as the 43d President of the American Society of International Law, as the newest member of IntLawGrrls!
A partner in the New York office of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Lucy specializes in international commercial arbitration. She serves as an arbitrator under rules of groups like the American Arbitration Association (AAA), the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA), and the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL); co-authored the Guide to ICSID Arbitration (2004) and The Freshfields Guide to Arbitration and ADR (1999); and lectured on private international law at The Hague Academy of International Law in 2001. While at the U.S. State Department, was deputy assistant legal adviser for international claims and investment disputes and the U.S. agent to the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal.
Lucy's an advisor to private and public clients alike; as an example, she advised the government of Liechtenstein in its International Court of Justice case against Germany alleging infringement of sovereignty and neutrality in Germany's post-World War II reparations regime. She was a co-director of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland, a Holocaust-related tribunal. Currently she's a member of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, whose findings respecting allegations of rape and sexual assault is the subject of her 1st post below.

Heartfelt welcome!

Loewen, behold

This week marks the 12th anniversary of the initial jury verdict in the amount of $500 million handed down by a Mississippi state court against The Loewen Group, Inc. and Raymond L. Loewen.
Devotees of the television program Six Feet Under will recognize Loewen (pronounced LO-en) as a major Canadian funeral home operator, rivaled only by the former Texas giant SCI Corporation. Devotees of investor-State arbitration will recognize The Loewen Group Inc. & Raymond L. Loewen v. United States as the 1st case filed against the United States under the investment chapter of the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA (logo at left), which took effect among Canada, Mexico, and the United States on January 1, 1994.
The Loewen case precipitated the formation of a new division within the Legal Adviser’s Office of the Department of State, which hired 5 attorneys to defend the United States against the claims in Loewen and the other cases that it seemed likely would follow. (Full disclosure: I was one of the 5, and I've written about the case here.) The United States won Loewen on what many argued were highly technical points that betrayed arbitrators more concerned about the political backlash should the United States lose a highly visible and contentious case rather than about awarding justice to a wronged Canadian company.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, the world of investor-State arbitration is thriving, with over 250 cases having been filed as of the end of 2006. The United States is indeed the defendant in several more cases, although its track record so far is perfect: it has prevailed in all cases that have so far gone to decision, and even won attorneys’ fees of several million dollars in the Methanex case.