Originally from Investment Treaty Arbitration and International Law - Volume 4

MR. LAIRD: Welcome everybody to the 4th Annual Juris Conference on Investment Treaty Arbitration. Four years ago, Todd Weiler, my friend and colleague, organized this conference in this very building. He had this wonderful idea of bringing in some of the bright lights in the field of international investment arbitration and getting them to think about some very interesting, fundamental and topical issues of the day and have them write some great papers. But not only that, it was to create a dialogue, a discussion. For whatever reason, it's worked out better sometimes than others. The idea has always been to try to create a little bit of tension, discussion, and debate about some of these issues. Today you'll be hearing many sides of the issues. The goal is generally to pick apart the issues that we've set out and get to the nub of them, get to some of the real raw details. Because international investment arbitration is a new area that's growing, a high level of discussion and analysis is certainly required.

I wanted to thank Todd for his vision and for bringing me on board in the second year and now we're four years on and we're just publishing our book from last year's conference. Part of the model is to publish the papers and the discussions in a book. Todd is holding up our latest book. You will all be receiving a copy of the proceedings and the papers once we get them all shined up and ready in book number four. The book is all part of the process of you being here and the discussions. It's very much a group effort.

I wanted to thank our authors firstly today for their efforts. I know I've been riding them hard the last month or two and they've performed marvelously in getting together their materials and their papers. Thanks to all the panelists as well for jumping in and playing that role of senior player, looking at these issues and digging them apart for us. I think we'll have a great discussion today.

Before we get into our first panel, I wanted to give some thanks to our marvelous sponsors, Skadden, Arps, Milbank, Cleary Gottlieb, Crowell & Moring, and King & Spalding. The International Law Institute and the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce as well as our media partners Transnational Dispute Management and Arbitration International also support us. Thank you to everyone. I have to make special mention to the organizers of the conference, Michael Kitzen. He's the President of Juris Conferences, the mastermind, and the producer of all the books and all the meetings. And, Candice Dubenski, who, as many of you may have seen her e-mails at various points, has put an enormous effort into this. Thank you. Without further ado I'm going to hand it over to Todd to introduce our first panel.