"... Pastures New":The 1997 Freshfields Lecture

Abstract

IN ENGLAND, things tend to take rather a long time to come to fruition. The members of the Departmental Advisory Committee, set up under the Chairmanship of Lord Mustill in 1985 to advise Ministers on the reforms desirable in arbitration law, were guilty at times of letting the grass grow under their feet. This too follows an English tradition. The story is told of an American tourist who asked the head gardener in Trinity College, Cambridge, how he managed to get the lawn in Great Court to look so good. ‘You just mow it for 500 years,’ was his somewhat condescending reply. Arbitration practitioners in London have just moved to a new pasture which, if not yet mowed for 500 years, has taken some time to grow to a stage in which the animals can be let loose to graze upon it. For the most part, it is far too soon to tell how the new Arbitration Act will work in practice. The objectives of some aspects of the Act have obviously been achieved. It was designed to consolidate the statutory law of arbitration into one statute and it has achieved this task. As a consequence, English arbitration law is easier to identify. Coupled with this consolidation of the law, the Act was designed to re-state English arbitration law, broadly following the pattern of the UNCITRAL Model Law. But perhaps more importantly, the law has now been expressed in plain language, which can hopefully be understood by ordinary people possessing a reasonable degree of literacy and not merely by lawyers trained in the mysteries of statutory ‘legalese’. This was the important contribution of the last of the ‘head gardeners’ – Lord Saville. All this has made English arbitration law more accessible. The new Act does not purport to be comprehensive …