Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law Volume 7

MR. SABAHI: For our keynote luncheon speech, we are fortunate enough to have the privilege to have Mr. David Haigh. David is a partner in Burnet Duckworth & Palmer’s Calgary office. He exclusively practices in international arbitration and frequently sits as arbitrator in a number of energy disputes. He has also tremendous amount of experience in litigation involving energy issues. His practice has been focusing on pipeline agreements, farm-out agreements, royalty interpretation, and disputes, operating procedure disputes with chemical construction, lease interpretation and oil-and-gas valuations and joint venture agreements. Thank you, David, for being with us, and without further ado, please.

LUNCHEON SPEAKER

MR. HAIGH: Thank you very much, and good afternoon, everybody. I prepared these remarks anticipating that the context was going to be that you would all be enjoying your lunch. I would hear the clatter of knives and forks, some side conversations going on and so on, and so it seems a rather stern environment now for some of the lightness that I’m about to offer you.

I framed my talk today in the form of two questions, and what they invoke for me is the popular long-running American game show “Jeopardy.” The format for that show, as many of you know, is that clues are provided to the contestants who then answer in the form of a question, so my answer to it will be “Who is an international arbitrator” or “What is an international arbitrator?” What follows may, to some extent, be the clues that I would like to offer you in that regard.

As many of you know, in 1996, Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth published their seminal study on the subject in a book entitled--and I should say parenthetically I hope they did this tongue in cheek--“Dealing In Virtue.”

Dezalay at the time was a sociologist and a director of research at the Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique, attached to the Centre de Sociolegie Européene at the Ecole des Hautes Études and also College de France. Garth at the time was a director of the American Bar Association in Chicago and previously had been Dean of the University of Indiana Law School. Today, he is Dean Emeritus at Southwestern University in Los Angeles.

Their book, “Dealing In Virtue,” was based on nearly 300 interviews of mostly lawyers in 11 different countries, together with written responses from informants from 25 countries, most active in international commercial arbitration. Not a few of the interviewees have become quite famous on a worldwide scale.