International Commercial Courts: The Future of Transnational Adjudication – An Introduction

Summary

In a world of cross-border transactions, parties could not find until recently recourse to international courts for cases involving exclusively private parties from different jurisdictions. International commercial arbitration instead assumed the role of default jurisdiction for the resolution of disputes of such cross-border transactions. The identified gap in international adjudication has eventually given rise to a new species of courts: international commercial courts (ICommCs). ICommCs are domestic courts as they are established under a domestic legal order, but are different from the ordinary courts of the host jurisdiction in a number of ways. At the same time, they have an international character due to their institutional design as well as the cross-border nature of their caseload. ICommCs are a novel addition to the international dispute settlement system as they represent an effort to globalise dispute resolution using a bottom-up approach. Overall, they are part of a new form of transnational adjudication that blurs traditional dichotomies between domestic and international, and public and private.