Cambridge Law Journal: Volume 83, Issue 2
The latest issue of the Cambridge Law Journal (Volume 83, Issue 2) features one article on private international law.
Ardavan Arzandeh, Interpreting Multiple Dispute-Resolution Clauses in Cross-Border Contracts, p. 244-273
Cross-border contracts often contain a clause which purports to reflect the parties’ intention regarding how disputes arising from their agreement should be resolved. Some such contracts might feature a “jurisdiction clause”, thus signifying the parties’ wish to subject their disputes to litigation before the courts in a specific state. Others may include an “arbitration clause”, meaning that claims arising from the contract should be subjected to an arbitral hearing. More unusual are cases in which the parties have included a jurisdiction and an arbitration clause in the same cross-border contract. This article seeks to assess English law’s approach to determining the parties’ preferred mode of dispute resolution in these more difficult cases. As it seeks to demonstrate, the current practice in this area is not always easy to defend. The article advances an alternative basis for determining which of the two competing clauses should prevail.
Mediation is a more conscious raising possibility to include, especially the more complicated situations.
Parties are stimulated to take full responsibility for the conflicts they are facing and can be guided to come to solutions that are win-win and stay out of arbitration and law suits.
This can have a surprising benifial ending and nwe beginning to include mediation.
My late husband Hans Loots ( a close friend of Hans van Loon, Secretar-General of The Hague Conference for many years) was a teacher of mediation and would have loved to support this in international private law disputes. Now Jordi Loverdos a lawyer and international mediator: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q46998630 could be an important helper to bring mediation into the International Private Law discussions and means to come to better solutions. At the same time this will upgrade the ways of finding peace in a much larger context.
L.K. Loots-Voigt, mediator and cultural antropologist, Netherlands.