Projects on contracts and arbitration

This section outlines two interdisciplinary research projects designed by Cordero-Moss for the General Course she will hold in 2027 at The Hague Academy of International Law. The General Course is devoted to the role of national law in contract construction in international commercial arbitration. Legal literature on this subject is abundant; to meet the high expectations surrounding a General Course of The Hague Academy, she employed empirical methods to verify the prevailing narrative on the topic.

These preliminary descriptive analyses suggest that neither parties nor tribunals consider state law as irrelevant or redundant. Preliminary empirical results thus challenge the assumptions that often underpin the narrative of a uniform approach in arbitration. Key insights indicate that:

I.                    although the autonomy of arbitration gives tribunals a wide scope of discretion, tribunals do not use it to disregard state law;

II.                  legal traditions continue to produce diverging outcomes, and transnational sources of soft law do not ensure uniform results;

III.                despite more standardized contract drafting, the same wording may lead to diverging results.