Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

Anniversaries are times for reflection, comparison, and evaluation. The 25th Anniversary of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration’s Dallas workshop is no exception. The first workshop was held in 1989. The arbitration world appeared rather different then. First, one of the biggest issues animating the commercial arbitration community was the degree to which arbitration could truly be “a-national” – delinked from the control of any municipal government to provide a truly neutral forum.1 Second, and not coincidentally closely linked to the first, was the question of the lex mercatoria – the modern iteration of the law merchant – including whether there was any such thing, if so what it included, and whether or not arbitrators had the authority to decide disputes based on such a transnational legal order.2 Third, investment arbitration existed, but in a much more limited guise. Hard though it is to believe now, the first investment treaty arbitration had only been filed in 1987, and a decision would not come down until 1990.3 Jan Paulsson’s seminal article, Arbitration without Privity, was not published until 1995.4