This module aims:

To Introduce students with the principles, laws and practice of international commercial and investment arbitration.

To enable students to accurately apply laws and principles to hypothetical facts.

To encourage students to critically consider important aspects of international commercial and investment arbitration.

To help students develop key legal and transferrable skills pertinent to arbitration process.

(LO1) Demonstrate detailed knowledge and understanding of the core principles of international commercial and investment arbitration.

(LO2) Identify and accurately apply the relevant law and principles to complex legal and factual problems.

(LO3) Critically appraise the legal framework surrounding international arbitration.

(LO4) Use and understand relevant statutory law and international conventions, arbitral rules, case law, and academicwriting.

(LO5) Comstruct effective and coherent legal arguements.

(S1) Problem solving skills

(S2) Communication skills

(S3) Commercial awareness

The module will cover the following topics:

- Introduction to international arbitration (definition and types of international arbitration, advantages and disadvantages compared to litigation and other methods of alternative dispute resolution, institutional and regulatory framework)

- Arbitration agreement (autonomy, types of agreements, law applicable to agreements, validity of agreements, drafting of arbitration clauses, pathological clauses)

- Arbitral tribunal (appointment of arbitrators, rights and duties of arbitrators, independence and impartiality of arbitrators, challenge and removal of arbitrators)

- Jurisdiction of arbitral tribunal (arbitrability, Kompetenz-Kompetenz doctrine–jurisdiction to decide on its own jurisdiction)

- Applicable law (law governing the arbitration procedure, determination of applicable law, applicable substantive law, lex mercatoria , ex aequo et bono)

- The conduct of arbitral procedure (ad hoc procedure s and institutional rules, organising arbitral proceedings, Terms of Reference, taking evidence, provisional measures, multi-party issues)

- Arbitral award (deliberations, form and content of the award, costs of arbitration, remedies against the award, the role of arbitral institution in the scrutiny of the award, appeals against the award in domestic courts, setting aside of the award)

- Recognition and enforcement of the arbitral award (enforcement of awards in English law, Convention for the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards 1958 (New York Convention), grounds for challenging awards under the New York Convention)

The module will provide a good overall review of international commercial and investment arbitration process. It will complement in particular the modules whose content is focused on legal relationships of commercial and economic nature such as Commercial Law, Banking Law, Company Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Legal Fundamentals of the World Economy. While in those modules students are taught about substantive law, this module will provide them with the knowledge and understanding of how to enforce the rights under that substantive law by means of arbitration.

Teaching Pattern
Learning and teaching on this module will be structured in accordance with the principles of Hybrid Active Learning with asynchronous materials and synchronous seminar sessions. Asynchronous recordings provide material previously addressed in physical lectures, suitably broken down (‘chunking’) and augmented (e.g. quizzes etc) so as to enhance student engagement. Synchronous sessions will run on a fortnightly pattern across the semester (i.e. 6 in total) and will each have a duration of 2 hours.

Module Delivery
This will be via combination of asynchronous and synchronous sessions i.e. Hybrid Active Learning:
- Recordings of lectures will be uploaded on CANVAS
- Six seminar sessions will be delivered on campus or via ZOOM
- Four to six online MCQ mini-quizzes