Originally from The Swedish Arbitration Act of 1999, Five Years On: A Critical Review of Strengths and Weaknesses

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ROBERT BRINER: We now come to the second session, on the applicable law. I have the pleasure of having with me on the table Claes Zettermarck, who is a partner with White & Case here in Stockholm with a lot of experience as arbitrator and litigator. Then we have Gunnar Nerdrum, whom you quickly heard from before, he introduced himself already. He wears two interesting hats: one fishing in Tromsø, as a lawyer there, a partner of Høyesterettsadvokat Nerdrum & Partners; and the other hat is closer to the ICC, where he is the Norwegian Court member, as member of Cabinet Taylor in Paris.

We do not have David Goldberg here, who at the very last moment had to send his apologies that he could not be with us today. He invited, asked, compelled to attend — I do not know what expression to use — his partner Tim Taylor, who is co-head of the International Arbitration Group at SJ Berwin, head of the Litigation Group in London, specialising in international dispute resolution, focusing on arbitration. 

Now, without further ado, I should like to invite Mr. Zettermarck to give us his report in the 25 minutes we have agreed upon.

CLAES ZETTERMARCK: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This session deals with applicable law. To be more precise, during the next 25 minutes — although it is not a guarantee, I must admit, but I will try to stick to the time limit — I will try to capture some aspects of the choice of law issues that we occasionally run into, as practitioners in the field of international arbitration.

I would like to stress, and this is of course a waiver for the questions that might surface later on, that I am a practitioner, not a professor of law, which sometimes limits the capacity to give right answers to each and every question.
I would also like to stress that, during a conference of this type, there is a slight tendency perhaps to focus on problems. But let us not forget that in many cases we manage to run international arbitrations and domestic arbitrations with no problems whatsoever. The processes do work, the processes do function.