Introduction: The Constitutional Law of International Commercial Arbitration

An exceptional feature of international arbitration is the extensive and meaningful dialogue that takes places between scholars and practitioners in the field. Unlike some other disciplines where the camps appear to talk past each other, international arbitration enjoys a rich relationship between the two. Practitioners have written some of the most important scholarly works in the field, while scholars have worked on some of the most important cases. In January 2009, the University of Georgia Law School and its Dean Rusk Center were pleased to bring together an elite group of scholars and practitioners for a day-long conference on the topic of international arbitration. The conference, entitled International Commercial Arbitration: Fifty Years After the New York Convention, celebrated both the achievements in the field of the past half-century and also highlighted the release of International Commercial Arbitration, a path-breaking two-volume treatise by Gary Born, one of the titans in the field whose professional accomplishments are matched by his scholarly productivity. This is the introduction to that Symposium