Women in Disputes: A History of European Women in Mediation and Arbitration, by Susanna Hoe and Derek Roebuck

Abstract

For longer than I can accurately recall, I have been a fan of the work of Derek Roebuck. As an academic, it has seemed to me until recently that international commercial arbitration was more performance art and a matter of practical wisdom than it was a subject to be studied. The only ‘real’ academic subjects were the cognate subjects—private international law, procedure, comparative law, and the like; that is, with the exception of history, because history brought depth and enrichment to what seemed otherwise to be largely a series of practical challenges to be worked out in the particular case with diligence and good sense. And so, when eventually I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Roebuck, his scholarship was already high on my list for works on arbitration. I had enjoyed his wonderful stories of arbitration in Greece, Rome, England, and the Middle Ages and the ways in which it had flourished and contributed to the welfare of businesses and individuals. All of these were told with the magical sense of discovery that comes of learning the truth of what one always suspected to be the case, but which had never been the subject of conventional wisdom.