In 2011, the investment world was rocked by the preliminary

award on jurisdiction and admissibility in Abaclat v. Argentine

Republic,1 which allowed 60,000 Italian claimants to assert their

claims at the same time. Abaclat was recently cited with approval

by a majority of arbitrators in Ambiente Ufficio S.p.A. v. Argentine

Republic,2 which also arose out of Argentina’s 2001 default on its

sovereign bonds. The panel discussed whether and to what extent

these decisions open the door to more mass arbitrations in the

investment context.

 

PROF. STRONG: After having heard the last panel’s excellent

discussion of class claims in arbitration, we are now going to

return to the issue of mass claims in the investment context.

Although this issue was covered by Carolyn Lamm in her keynote

address, our second panel is going to come at the issue from a

slightly different perspective, not only discussing the groundbreaking

jurisdictional award and dissent in Abaclat but also

taking into account more recent developments, including the

decision in Ambiente Ufficio. Among other things, our two

speakers will consider whether and to what extent mass

investment arbitration will arise in the future, a question that was

briefly considered by Carolyn earlier today.

 

The members of this second panel are uniquely situated to

discuss these issues. Our first speaker is Michael Waibel of the

University of Cambridge, who is doubtless known to all of you as

the author of “Opening Pandora’s Box: Sovereign Bonds in

International Arbitration.”3 “Opening Pandora’s Box” not only won

the ASIL Francis Deák Prize in 2008, but was one of the first major

pieces published on Argentina’s sovereign bond crisis. Michael

has continued his work in this field with a book entitled Sovereign

Defaults Before International Courts and Tribunals,4 which won
the European Society of International Law Book Prize in 2012.