Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law - Volume 10

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PANEL 1

MR. LAIRD:  Welcome everybody.  It’s fantastic to see so many friends again and colleagues from Washington and abroad.  I think we have a great mix of attendees this year, and our Panels are, as usual, of excellent quality, and we’ll have a number of diverse subjects to discuss over the next few days.

My name is Ian Laird.  I’m one of the co chairs of this Juris Conference on Investment Treaty Arbitration, and, with me, standing here are my co chairs:  Professor Frédéric Sourgens, from Washburn University Law School; Dr. Borzu Sabahi, who is an attorney here at Curtis, Mallet in Washington, D.C.; and my colleague, Dr. Todd Weiler from London, Ontario, someone I think who needs very little introduction.  But as the founder of this conference and since this is the Tenth Anniversary, I thought it would be appropriate to have Todd come up and share some of his thoughts about some of the roots of the conference and kick things off.

DR. WEILER:  Good afternoon, everybody.  Thank you again for coming.  I have lots of people to thank, and I want to do it fairly quickly because thanking is not exactly as exciting as substantive research, but the first people we have to thank, of course, are Mike and Candy, of Juris Publications for the ten years, not just for the conference, but also for the lovely books we have had put out.  

As you all know, our model is both unique and very rewarding for all of the panelists, I hope, and also certainly for the authors.  We now have quite an alumni group of authors, after ten years of a lot of people.  It is funny because Borzu was one of them, and a lot of people, who five, ten years ago were authors, are now leading in this field.  So, it is quite gratifying to have been able to give them their first chance to write a paper and to have to defend it in this kind of context.

And, of course, I definitely need to thank Fred and Borzu, and Ian especially.  Ian has this habit of actually taking a really good idea that I may have had and actually implementing it in such a way that it actually works, sort of like “investmentclaims.com” or this conference, for example.  So, it’s very good to have Ian.  I don’t know what I would do without Ian actually.  I think it would  well, I’d have some ideas, and no one would ever hear about them.

Particular pride we take, actually, in the materials that we produce and the debates and discussions that we have.  I’ve oftentimes heard from participants over the years that the quality is, at least if you’re not  just higher than a lot of other conferences, and I think it’s because we really try to eschew talking heads and, rather, have a debate and discussion amongst people who are experts in the field and, therefore, can contribute something.  And also, of course, a lot of it is the really interesting topics we choose, and in that regard, I, again, thank Freddie and Borzu and Ian for coming up with really good topics because one person coming up with topics is not usually going to be a good thing.