Originally from Pro-Arbitration Revisited: A Tribute to Professor George Bermann from his Students Over the Years

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I. INTRODUCTION

I met Professor Bermann back in the Spring semester of 2003. I was a LLM student at Columbia Law School and took his course on Transnational Litigation and Arbitration. He is a unique professor: with an extraordinary and gifted mind, committed to his students and exuding passion and knowledge about the topics he taught. My time at Columbia and specifically my exposure to his course were game changers for my professional career. I was lucky enough to later become Counsel at the ICC International Court of Arbitration in Paris overseeing cases in Latin America, Spain and Portugal and a partner at Cuatrecasas co-leading its international arbitration group and devoting my entire time to the practice of international arbitration, both as counsel and arbitrator. After I left Columbia Law School, I met again Professor Bermann several times. Most notably in 2017 when I had the privilege to sit as an arbitrator in a tribunal chaired by him. It was a wonderful experience which lasted a couple of years and gave me the special privilege of now being able to address Prof. Bermann simply as George, in a true sign of friendship and affection.

II. ON GEORGE’S PRO-ARBITRATION ARTICLE

In his article, George carefully demonstrated how difficult it can be to espouse the view that a policy is “pro-arbitration”. Arbitration is a system composed of internal values that sometimes contradict each other. In some instances, a policy might encourage certain values of the arbitral process at the expense of others that may be equally or even more important. George identifies different policies that could be labeled as arbitration friendly. It is not very difficult to imagine how they could sometimes collide between them.