The Culture of International Arbitration and the Evolution of Contract Law by Joshua D. Karton

Abstract

The Culture of International Arbitration and the Evolution of Contract Law by Joshua D. Karton Published by Oxford University Press, 2013, ISBN 9780199658008 (296 pages) Some say that seeing yourself described flatteringly in print is the number one reason to read a book. If so, members of the international arbitration community are going to queue up around the block to get their hands on Professor Joshua Karton's new publication, ‘The Culture of International Arbitration and the Evolution of Contract Law’. Karton, who teaches at Queen's University in Ontario, takes a sociologically minded lawyer's look at those of us who practice international commercial arbitration, as counsel and/or arbitrators or as commentators, and describes what he finds to be our ‘culture’. In short, he likes what he sees: a pattern of four shared values that sound pretty darned good, namely respect for party autonomy, the service of business, neutrality and internationalism. Karton goes further, however, and argues that this culture is leading to substantive arbitral interpretations of contract law that may differ from judicial interpretations. Whether the evidence supports that leap will be the subject of debate among his readers. Karton's book takes off from the pioneering work on the sociology of international arbitration by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth in their 1996 book, ‘Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order,’ which discussed the ‘symbolic capital’ (the recognition that successful members of a community receive from the rest of the group) found among arbitration practitioners. Like Dezalay and Garth, Karton conducted in-depth interviews of a cross-section of the relevant community, using a rather open-ended series of questions to see what themes emerged. He describes this as ‘theoretical sampling,’ in which the researcher looks over the data he has collected (here, from just twenty anonymous interviewees, all either full or part-time arbitrators) ‘based on whether the data will help to identify and describe social norms, and not on the basis of …