Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law - Volume 13

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PANEL 1

MR. TEDDY BALDWIN: Welcome, everyone, very much to this event, and I do want to just take one moment to talk about the event because I have been involved in this event for a while, and one of the things that I really like about it, in addition to the fact that I’m a big fan of Juris, is that we have authors in this event that are given positions, and they argue those positions, and then we have an esteemed panel over here who also were sort of assigned positions to talk about in the panel.  So, it’s much different than you would see in a conference where everybody comes up and basically doesn’t say a lot because they don’t want to take positions that are one way or another.

This is meant to be very much a discussion, very much an interaction between the authors, the panelists, back and forth, and I would ask, too, when it comes to question times, that you give it to these guys as hard as you can, too, in terms of asking questions that are really going to put them on the spot, so it’s a really interactive thing.

The other thing that I just to want make clear – and it should be clear from what I just said, but just in case it’s not, is because people were given positions – these authors were told what side of this issue that they were to write about, and the panelists also were given positions to argue, these positions likely – may or may not – represent the views of the people on the stage, and they’ll probably say the same thing.  But I did want to give that overall comment, especially as being the first panel of the day, that these are not – these people arguing as to their own particular views but arguing out these issues.