MR. LAIRD: Thank you everyone and welcome to the Fifth Annual Juris Investment Treaty Arbitration Conference. We were here roughly five years ago when Todd Weiler first put this conference on and it was a great success. It’s nice to be back here and feeling that sense again. I wanted to thank Todd for his great vision in putting this conference together.

It’s very unique in the conference world. As of today, we have had 40 young authors who have put a lot of effort into writing a paper and trying to take two sides or various elements of an issue and work through it and go through the fire of the more senior panel. This model has worked very well. We have had a number of books published and it’s been an excellent way of bringing up young practitioners and academics. I want to thank Todd for that. Not to go overboard, but Todd likes it. He likes all the accolades.

To start off, I would like to say thanks to a few people. Thank you very much to Juris Conferences for organizing the event. They’ve put a lot of faith in Todd and myself to organize this over the years, and we really appreciate their encouragement and their support.

I would like to thank our various sponsors. We have a number of law firms that have been very active in supporting the conference: Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy; Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle; Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Crowell & Moring; Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton; and Arnold & Porter. I also want to recognize Transnational Dispute Management, who is our media partners.

The topic we’ve picked today is rather ominous and perhaps an over the top title: “The Future of ICSID.” Between conference organizers and tabloid writers, we tend to go a little over the top in order to provoke a bit of debate and generate some interest. This year we tried to pick four topics, which focus on some of the challenges that will be faced by ICSID in the coming years.

Despite the fact we will be focusing on those challenges, I would have to say from our viewpoint and, I will speak for Todd on this, that the future of ICSID is certainly very bright. It has come a long way over the past 50 years. It provides an extraordinary mechanism for investors to be involved in arbitration directly with a State in a system that is fundamentally State-to-State. This is truly a novel mechanism and something that clearly is still developing. In the last 10 years we have seen an incredible growth in cases, in jurisprudence, in conferences like this, and of books. Certainly we can say that ICSID is facing these challenges but that it looks bright as we move forward.

So, without further ado, I will pass over the panel to Timothy Nelson, who is a partner at Skadden Arps. Tim has been a long-time supporter of this conference and has been here a number of times before. We wanted him on the first panel on a very interesting topic, which we have titled “The Inherent Authority of an ICSID Tribunal: What is the Limit?” Thanks very much, Tim.