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Nigel Blackaby and Constantine Partasides QC, with Alan Redfern and Martin Hunter (eds), Redfern and Hunter on International Arbitration

Document Cited authorities 5 Cited in Related
Vincent
Pages134-136
DOI10.3366/elr.2017.0401
Published date01 January 2017
Author
Date01 January 2017

The last decade has seen much soul-searching amongst arbitration scholars and practitioners on the very nature of the process, as in Emanuel Gaillard's Aspects philosophiques du droit de l'arbitrage international (2008) and Jan Paulsson's The Idea of Arbitration (2013). These attempts to lay the conceptual foundations for an autonomous international legal order, however, have not persuaded important members of the audience, such as Lord Mance JSC, in his 2015 Freshfields Lecture, “Arbitration – a Law unto Itself” (2016) 32 Arbitration International 223 and Hilary Heilbron QC, “Dynamics, discretion, and diversity: a recipe for unpredictability in international arbitration” (2016) 32 Arbitration International 261 (the authors having been respectively Justice and counsel in the landmark decision of the Supreme Court in Dallah Real Estate and Tourism Holding Co v Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Government of Pakistan [2011] 1 AC 763).

Beside these more philosophical questions, however, arbitrations trundle on. In the jurisdictions of the United Kingdom, where procedural law has rarely been considered a subject worthy of rigorous academic study, the work of two City lawyers, Alan Redfern and Martin Hunter, for many years, partners at Freshfields, before transferring to the bar, produced one of the great works, in any language, on international arbitration. First published in 1986 (under the title, Law and Practice of International Commercial Arbitration), in the sixth edition of 2015 the torch has now passed to the new editors in the form of Nigel Blackaby and Constantine Partasides QC. Although it is not often acknowledged as such, it may rank as perhaps the most accomplished work of comparative law in English. Indeed, a comparison between the various national or local rules on international arbitration – each of which bear the indelible influence of the UNCITRAL Model Law and the UNCITRAL Rules – are a testament to the power of soft law in legal convergence, where the soft law is accompanied by the sort of hard critical and practical analysis contained in a text such as this.

The Model Law was once wholly incorporated into Scots law: it applied to an international commercial arbitration of which Scots law was the seat as a result of the inauspiciously-titled, Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Scotland) Act 1990 (section 66 and schedule 7). With the introduction of the Arbitration (Scotland) Act 2010, the Model Law lives on in spirit, for the...

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