This chapter suggests that political systems theory allows us to make better sense of the fragmented understanding we have today of investment law in general and of investment arbitration in particular. Relying on a theory by David Easton, the chapter presents investment arbitration as a...

International arbitration entertains a particular relationship with its own literature – the written knowledge in the field and about the field. This relationship is marked by one big mix, be it in the form of competition or cooperation, of practitioners who use it, legal entrepreneurs who...

Fifteen years ago, sociologist Yves Dezalay and lawyer Bryant Garth wrote an enormously successful book in which they asked a simple but important question: What sort of people become successful arbitrators? The main result of their research was to identify two quite different generations of...

Understanding the nature and contours of transnational legality is an important challenge, as it may bear on the place that transnational law should be given within the existing frameworks of public and private international law. This article discusses three questions, which have emerged in the...

The rapid growth of electronic commerce increases the potential for conflicts over contracts which have been entered into online (e.g. about price, late delivery, defects, specifications ...). Thus, the use of online dispute resolution (ODR) mechanisms to resolve such e-commerce conflicts is...

ODR systems can be considered to be a very specific kind of Web services, requiring the support of new types of communication adapted to dispute resolution processes (negotiation, mediation, and arbitration) and corresponding to security mechanisms such as integrity and confidentiality of data....

This report seeks to assess both legally and technologically the first experiments in online dispute resolution and to formulate, on this basis, recommendations for the improvement of dispute settlement mechanisms using information technology. It involves, first, a review of the existing...

This article seeks to examine the fertility, for the regulation of cyberspace, of the "pyramid-network hypothesis". This hypothesis is the conjecture that the process of how law is being created, generally, in all fields of the law, is undergoing a paradigm shift. It is moving away from a...

Thomas Schultz ... gave ... a paper that went through many of the practical issues placing ADR on-line ranging from obstacles to implementation and efficacy to financial structures and technological architecture. [He] concluded that to make cyberspace a complete market place ODR mechanisms were...

Online dispute resolution systems can be effective in a way that courts, mostly, cannot, because they operate on much smaller costs. When connected to self-enforcement mechanisms, ODR systems could create a global law without a state, a whole new, independent and transnational legal order: the...