Cities Compete to Be the Arena for Global Legal Disputes 

The 48-mile Panama Canal expansion is an engineering marvel that promises to speed up international commerce and may be a boon for global ports. It is also one that involves lots of disputes over cost overruns and construction delays, and pushed completion beyond the canal’s 100th anniversary last month.

Rather than hash out any of the issues in Panama, where the court system could have an intrinsic bias toward the government, the feuding parties mutually agreed to iron out $1.6 billion in disputes in Miami.

It’s not that Miami had any special connection to the construction in Panama. The city worked to attract the proceedings as part of a concerted effort to become an international hub for arbitration proceedings.

“People know when they have such a dispute that they will be forever foreigners,” said Jan Paulsson, an international arbitration specialist who teaches at the University of Miami’s School of Law, “and they would rather be in a place where the other side does not have advantage and everyone is equal.”

“Arbitration has grown steadily because it provides a forum for the selection of neutral decision makers attuned to cultural and legal differences,” said Edna Sussman, an arbitrator and lawyer who teaches at Fordham Law School. Local courts often make a venue important, she said, because parties look to the readiness and training of judges to apply arbitration law while proceedings are underway and enforce any big-dollar awards that result.

Source: NYT

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