Penn State Law Review - Symposium "Building A Civilization Of Arbitration"

I am pleased to announce that the Penn State Law Review will soon publish a symposium issue entitled "Building a Civilization of Arbitration." Below is a brief excerpt from the introduction written by Professor Thomas Carbonneau.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s “work product” has generated a large and growing arbitration bar. It also has finally begun to stimulate a greater volume of academic activity on the topic of arbitration. The work of legal practitioners and academics, along with the courts’ decisional law, are “Building a Civilization of Arbitration” that codifies advances and grapples with the controversial aspects of law-in-the-making. The Penn State Dickinson School of Law takes great pride in welcoming a distinguished group of lawyers and law teachers to the pages of its Law Review. They are the leaders in the field of arbitration. Their contributions identify the settled law and evaluate it from a variety of analytical, intellectual, and institutional perspectives.

The lead article addresses the concept of designing arbitrations from the perspective of two mainstays of the U.S. Supreme Court decisional law on arbitration: Volt Info. Sciences, Inc. and Mastrobuono. The article evaluates the use of contract freedom in the context of the judicial construction of party intent. Beyond this, the symposium investigates a wide variety of cutting-edge topics, ranging from recent landmark cases to investment arbitration and including the reform of the FAA, the concept of private ordering in international commercial arbitration (ICA), empirical developments in consumer arbitration, third-party interests in arbitration, various provocative comparative law developments—the role of courts in national arbitration laws, a lucid evaluation of the Russian Federation’s statist concept of arbitration, an equally insightful comparison of Canadian and United States consumer arbitration, and an evaluation of an important recent book on ICA. All self-respecting legal publications should include book reviews, and we are proud and delighted to have this one.