Josh Karton - International Arbitration

The “black box” of international commercial arbitration might be giving up some of its secrets soon, and Queen’s Law professor Joshua Karton will be part of the team getting a peek inside.

Arbitration is an increasingly important means for resolving crossborder commercial disputes, but most international arbitral tribunals keep their decisions confidential. Even the mere existence of a dispute is usually secret; hence, the “black box” analogy many insiders use: “A dispute goes in, a decision comes out, and no one really knows what happens in between,” observes Karton, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research, a specialist in international commercial law and dispute resolution, and author of a 2013 book about the international arbitration field.

Karton is the only North American on the 10-member international research team – lawyers, sociologists and psychologists – awarded a grant worth £1.1 million over five years from the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council.

Their study, unprecedented in size and scope, will involve 400 on-location interviews and focus groups in 130 cities to determine how European arbitrators actually make decisions in cross-border commercial disputes, accounting for the impact of arbitrator diversity, market incentives, intra-tribunal dynamics, and the social networks that shape the delivery of commercial justice in Europe.

As Karton points out, grants of this size are rare in legal research, and international arbitration researchers may not get one like it again for a long time. “I’m excited to do such groundbreaking work on an important but poorly understood field.”