Out now: Private International Law and Arbitral Jurisdiction by Faidon Varesis

Ever since the infamous West Tankers saga, if not before, the interplay between the international jurisdiction of national courts and arbitral tribunals has been subject to a constant stream of publications. Writing a monograph on this topic that is both fundamental and innovative in this field is therefore no small feat – making this book by Faidon Varesis, which has come out at the beginning of the year and is based on his Cambridge dissertation, all the more impressive.

The book is organized in three parts (which are not evident from the Table of Contents). Varesis first discusses the importance of commercial disputes in a globalized world, focusing on the private and regulatory interests involved. He then looks more closely at the issue of jurisdiction and the interplay between litigation and arbitration at what he identifies as “jurisdictional intersections” (referring to a range of different situations in which state courts or arbitral tribunals need to resolve questions of adjudicative jurisdiction), before discussing the concept of party autonomy and its expression in an arbitration agreement. In the second part, Varesis then develops a theoretical model for the distribution of jurisdiction between arbitration and litigation that puts the arbitration agreement at its centre. In the third and final part, the author then tests this model against the current legal framework in England and Wales and demonstrates how it would enable courts and arbitral tribunals alike to solve questions arising at the aforementioned jurisdictional intersections in a global-law spirit.

Arguably the most significant contribution of this book to existing scholarship and debates is its attempt to construct a system around a “horizontal” (rather than hierarchical) relationship between arbitration and litigation as two equivalent yet interdependent modes of dispute resolution. How much appetite there is for such an approach in the wake of Katharina Pistor’s Code of Capital and other critical accounts of corporations seemingly using the law to create and (re-)distribute capital and wealth behind closed doors is obviously open to debate; but this does not make Varesis’ attempt to reconstruct a horizontal system of jurisdiction, arbitral or adjudicatory, that reconciles the distribution of regulatory competence with the need for substantial fairness any less of an intellectually stimulating exercise.