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115 AJIL Unbound 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/ajilunbo115 and id is 1 raw text is: doi:10.1017/aju.2020.83 INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON GLOBAL LABS OF INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL DISPUTE RESOLUTION Anthea Roberts Legal globalization has never been flat, but is it decentralizing and rebalancing? The two main centers for inter- national commercial dispute resolution and global governance since the post-World War II period-New York and London-are based in states that have been affected by strong anti-globalization movements. By contrast, multiple jurisdictions in Asia, the Middle East and Continental Europe are experimenting with novel institutional designs in an effort to become world-recognized fora for resolving international commercial disputes. This sym- posium explores the emergence of these new legal hubs across Eurasia and beyond,1 and considers what this global laboratory of international commercial courts and dispute resolution services might mean for the diversi- fication of such dispute resolution going forward. All of this is also playing out as the coronavirus pandemic is unfolding, adding new dynamics into the mix. Just as the United States benefits from issuing the world's reserve currency, so the United States and the United Kingdom often enjoy the exorbitant privilege of issuing the world's reserve law and providing the world's centers for international commercial dispute resolution.2 Of the top one hundred highest-grossing law firms in the world, ninety-one are headquartered in the United States and the United Kingdom. The New York offices of U.S. firms earn around US$1.8 billion annually from international dispute resolution, and almost two thirds of litigants in English commercial courts are foreign. The legal sector accounts for 1.5 percent of UK gross domestic product, which is nearly double the percentage in other large European states. The topography of legal globali- zation is decidedly pointy3 Yet times, they are a'changin. Or are they? That is one of the questions posed by this symposium. On the one hand, trade protectionism, nationalist politics, and the return of sovereignty in these traditional centers of inter- national dispute resolution are shifting the tectonic plates of both private and public international law. The election of Donald Trump in the United States, and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, raised questions about whether the dominance of New York and London as the primary jurisdictions for international commercial dispute res- olution would continue. Meanwhile new international commercial courts-English-language domestic courts that focus on international commercial disputes-have been established or considered in Eurasian economies like Dubai (2004), Qatar (2009), Singapore (2015), and China (2018), and continental European states like France (2010), Germany (2018), and the Netherlands (2019).4 Many of these new courts are intended to serve as one-stop shops for international commercial dispute reso- lution, primarily for private parties but also potentially for investor-state disputes, in financial centers like Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Dubai, and Kazakhstan. These new dispute resolution services are not only aimed at catering for the economic rise of the region, but they also reflect the much more positive popular sentiment toward * Professor, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National Universiy, Canberra, Australia. Matthew S. Erie, The New Legal Hubs: The Einergent Landscape of International Commercial Dispute Resolution, 60 VA. J. INT'L L. 225 (2020). 2 Internaonal Comierci1 Law: Exorbitant Privilege, ECONOMIST (May 10, 2014). 3 ANTHEA ROBERTS, IS INTERNATIONAL LAw INTERNATIONAL? (2017). 4 Pamela K. Bookman, The Adjudicaion Business, 45 YALE J. INT'L L. 227 (2020). © Anthea Roberts 2021. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence 1 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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