Article | Class Arbitration Outside the United States: Reading the Tea Leaves

A new paper is available from S.I Strong, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Missouri and contributor to this blog, entitled Class Arbitration Outside the United States: Reading the Tea Leaves. The paper was initially presented at the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) Thirtieth Anniversary Annual Meeting on Multiparty Arbitration, held last December in Paris. The finished work appears in Dossier VII: Arbitration and Multiparty Contracts, published earlier this year by the ICC Institute of World Business Law.

Here is the abstract:

This draft paper, which is expected to be published in 2010 by the ICC Institute of World Business Law in Dossier VII – Multiparty Arbitration, discusses the question of whether and to what extent class arbitration (also known as class action arbitration) will expand beyond the borders of the United States and the ways in which the device might change to suit the needs of different legal systems. In so doing, the paper discusses recent empirical evidence involving the increasing availability of collective relief in the judicial context in systems around the world and argues that courts, arbitrators and parties outside the United States are unlikely to adopt the U.S. model of class arbitration but will instead create into a new form of multiparty arbitration that is more appropriately termed “collective arbitration,” due to anticipated similarities to various forms of collective redress in different legal systems. The discussion also considers the policy rationales affecting the decision to create or utilize a form of collective arbitration as well as the theoretical debates that affect the expansion of class or collective arbitration into new jurisdictions.

The paper is available without charge from Social Science Research Network and may be read here. Other papers by Professor Strong can be found here.

Last week, Disputing posted here about an international class arbitration article recently written by Professor Strong, From Class to Collective: The De-Americanization of Class Arbitration.

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