Acceso usuarios
Zachary Mollengarden
Reviewing Alec Stone Sweet and Florian Grisel’s The Evolution of International Arbitration in these pages in 2019, Victor Ferreres Comella praised the authors for “a very interesting and timely book” that would “certainly shed light on current controversies over the role of arbitration in the transnational sphere.”1 The same can, and deservedly will, be said of Ferreres’ recent contribution, The Constitution of Arbitration. In the book’s half-title page, Ferreres’ publisher suggests a few additional accolades: “the first systematic discussion of arbitration from a constitutional perspective”; a clear explanation of the “rich landscape of arbitration”; and a work that “bridges the gap between constitutional and arbitral theory.”2 To an impressive extent, The Constitution of Arbitration lives up to these promises. Ferreres brings a constitutional perspective to bear on arbitration in order to, as he puts it, “interpret what we see” in the “arbitral landscape,”3 and that constitutional lens often brings important features of arbitration and the normative debates that surround it into illuminating relief. Meanwhile, the book’s missteps, while consequential, are generally of the most forgivable sort: a product of grand ambitions, and so promises not-quite kept. In brief, measured against a standard other than the exceedingly high bar Ferreres sets himself, The Constitution of Arbitration succeeds.
