Originally from American Review of International Arbitration - ARIA

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Fouchard Gaillard & Goldman, the leading treatise on international commercial arbitration in the French language, is now available in English under the joint editorship of Emmanuel Gaillard—one of the co-authors—and John Savage. As we indicated in our commentary on the French edition in a previous issue of this Review,1 this book does much more for the student, the scholar or the practitioner than accurately and thoughtfully portraying the law of international commercial arbitration from the French standpoint : it constitutes a comprehensive study of the theory and practice of international commercial arbitration from the broad perspective of the authors’ scholarly knowledge and practical experience, in part premised upon the comparative law analysis of problems and solutions. The consideration of the empirical aspects and implications of different issues does not preempt the authors from presenting in a transparent way the most complex and intricate theoretical questions and solutions associated with them, such as, for example, those arising in the area of conflict of laws in connection both with the procedure and the substance of the dispute submitted to arbitration.

For the American reader, this book is very useful for different reasons. In the first place, it is a treatise and not a casebook. It thus permits—whatever the level of knowledge of the law of arbitration of the reader—rapid access to the information required and finding a quick answer for the question raised. This is helped by the rigorous—Cartesian one would venture to say—order in which the law of arbitration is presented and studied through the six parts of the book. The first Part deals with “Definitions and Sources.” Part II, on the arbitration agreement, also covers the important topic of the autonomy of the arbitration agreement and the special contributions of French case law, doctrinal opinions and decisions of French arbitrators in this respect, as well as the effects, assignment and expiration of the arbitration agreement. Part III refers to the arbitral tribunal, its constitution and the legal status of arbitrators. Part IV is consecrated to the arbitral procedure, including the not infrequently decisive question of provisional