Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

Yogi Berra got it wrong.1 The problem with déjà vu is not that you only understand the real message when you see it for the third or fourth time. The problem is that you cannot see déjà vu the first time. There are many problems in this world which could be avoided entirely if you could understand déjà vu before the second time, or the third. The fourth time may be far too late. If we can, we should try to understand something that is happening now for the first time and try to fix it before it is too late, so as to avoid saying, like Yogi Berra, in years to come, that we could and should have understood and done something now, the first time, before it became “déjà vu all over again.” This something that is happening now is the story of an arbitral institution under threat for more than one year, with no fix immediately in sight: the ICSID.

In London we know too well how legal institutions begin to crumble, at first imperceptively, and then, suddenly, with alarming speed. This happened to the English Commercial Court in the early 1960s. Those were fixed by their users provoked by Lord Devlin, one of our greatest commercial judges and later a distinguished international arbitrator. It also happened to the LCIA in the early 1990s. That institution was also fixed by its users motivated by Sir Michael Kerr and Bertie Vigrass, without whom the LCIA would not now exist at all.