| Abstrakt: |
Arbitration has dominated the landscape of the resolution of international commercial disputes (that is, private disputes involving transnational connections). Nevertheless, the last fifteen years have witnessed a proliferation in the establishment of new commercial courts in several countries, with the aim of attracting international commercial disputes. This article makes the novel argument that such attempts are unlikely to render adjudication an attractive alternative to arbitration. For the new international commercial courts to fully realize their potential and produce a sustainable market of adjudication, some mechanism is needed to secure the enforceability of jurisdiction clauses and the judgments delivered by courts in other jurisdictions. Although such mechanism is provided by the 2005 Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements, this convention has failed to gain international support. This is puzzling given that this convention adopts the same principles that enabled the success of the 1958 New York Arbitration Convention—namely enforcing party choice of forum and facilitating enforcement of the resolution’s outcome. This article provides the first attempt to analyze the reasons for this failure. To this end, it compares the political and legal conditions under which the two conventions were conceived, showing how the differences in these conditions have led to lower international acceptance of the Hague Convention. This article supports this analysis by focusing on the most recent ratification of the Hague Convention by the UK. We advance the novel argument that this case study demonstrates the important role played by the legal community in the ratification process. We show that, ironically, the UK’s decision to quit the EU in order to restore national sovereignty was a major reason leading to its ratification of the Hague Convention, thus giving up fundamental principles of common law that had granted English courts broad discretion as to whether to enforce jurisdiction clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
