23rd Vis East Moot Oral Arguments

International commercial arbitration emerged in the twentieth century as the dominant mechanism for resolving cross-border business disputes, offering parties a neutral forum, enforceable awards, and procedural flexibility that national courts often could not match. The 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, now ratified by over 170 states, established the foundational legal architecture by obliging contracting states to recognize arbitration agreements and enforce awards rendered abroad, subject only to narrow grounds for refusal. The 1985 UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, revised in 2006, further harmonized national arbitration statutes and has been adopted in whole or in part by more than 85 jurisdictions. The core disputes in the field concern the proper allocation of authority between arbitral tribunals and national courts, the scope of party autonomy, the standards governing arbitrator independence and impartiality, and the legitimacy of investor-state arbitration in particular. Recurring debates include the treatment of third-party funding, the use of emergency arbitrators, the enforceability of awards set aside at the seat, and the boundaries of public policy as a ground for refusing enforcement. Leading institutions such as the ICC, LCIA, SIAC, HKIAC, and SCC compete for caseload and continuously update their rules to address transparency, efficiency, and diversity on tribunals. Today the field faces pressure to modernize: critics point to high costs, duration of proceedings, and a lack of geographic and gender diversity among arbitrators, while supporters emphasize that arbitration remains indispensable to global commerce. UNCITRAL Working Group II continues to refine instruments on expedited arbitration and adjudication, and Working Group III is reforming investor-state dispute settlement. The interplay between commercial arbitration, sanctions regimes, and sustainability obligations is also reshaping practice.

International trade law governs the cross-border exchange of goods, services, and increasingly digital products, resting on a framework built after the Second World War to prevent the protectionism and economic nationalism associated with the interwar period. The 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was succeeded in 1995 by the World Trade Organization, which expanded coverage to services (GATS), intellectual property (TRIPS), and dispute settlement through the WTO Appellate Body. Alongside this multilateral system, UNCITRAL and UNIDROIT have produced harmonizing instruments for private trade transactions, while regional and bilateral free trade agreements have proliferated. The central disputes today concern the erosion of the multilateral order. The WTO Appellate Body has been paralyzed since 2019 due to the United States blocking appointments, prompting workarounds such as the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement. Trade tensions between the United States and China, the weaponization of tariffs and export controls, subsidies for strategic industries (semiconductors, electric vehicles, green technologies), and the use of trade measures to pursue climate, labor, and security objectives have strained existing rules. Carbon border adjustment mechanisms, forced-labor import bans, and critical minerals supply chains have become flashpoints. Running beneath these high-profile disputes is a body of private international trade law: the CISG, Incoterms, UCP 600 on documentary credits, and the New York Convention. These instruments enable day-to-day commerce regardless of geopolitical turbulence. The challenge for the coming years is reconciling open trade with legitimate regulatory autonomy, supply-chain resilience, and the structural transformation of trade by digitalization and decarbonization.

The CISG, adopted in Vienna in 1980 under the auspices of UNCITRAL and in force since 1 January 1988, is the principal uniform law governing international sales contracts for goods. It grew out of decades of harmonization efforts dating back to Ernst Rabel's comparative studies in the 1930s and the 1964 Hague Uniform Laws (ULIS and ULF), which failed to gain wide adoption. The CISG was designed to bridge civil-law and common-law traditions, offering a neutral default regime that applies when parties have their places of business in different contracting states, unless they opt out. It now binds over 95 states, including most major trading nations. The Convention covers contract formation, the obligations of buyers and sellers, remedies for breach (including avoidance, damages, and specific performance), passing of risk, and exemptions for impediments such as force majeure under Article 79. Persistent interpretive disputes include the scope of the Convention's exclusion of validity issues, the standard for fundamental breach under Article 25, the buyer's notice obligations under Articles 38 and 39, the meaning of conformity under Article 35 (now including debates over ethical, sustainability, and regulatory standards), and the relationship between the CISG and domestic remedies for misrepresentation. The CISG Advisory Council issues influential, non-binding opinions, and the UNCITRAL CLOUT database collects case law to promote uniform interpretation as required by Article 7. The United Kingdom remains the most prominent non-party, and many practitioners in commodity trades routinely exclude the Convention. Contemporary debates focus on its application to digital goods and software, supply-chain due diligence, pandemic and sanctions-related disruption under Article 79, and whether amendment or supplementation is needed to address modern commercial realities. For arbitration moots such as Vis, the CISG provides the substantive law backbone against which procedural and contractual questions are tested.