This chapter follows the Lena Goldfields Arbitration of 1930 and examines the legal practices deployed by the parties and the tribunal in their relation to the internationalisation of concession agreements. The tribunal was constituted after a dispute arose between a British company and the Soviet state over the fate of a concession agreement granted in 1925 concerning goldmines in Siberia, and it is the only international arbitration the Soviet Union ever participated in. The chapter takes as a starting point that the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union led to a fundamental change in the structure of the legal order, especially with regard to property rights. Instead of private individual ownership, Soviet law prescribed collectivised state ownership. The chapter argues that the tribunal elevated the jurisdiction over the Lena Goldfields concession agreement to the international level in order to override the application of socialist Soviet law. This elevation was achieved by relying on legal techniques concerning the competence of the arbitral tribunal and the applicable law to the concession agreement. While the Soviet Union maintained that the dispute was a matter of domestic jurisdiction, the company and the tribunal claimed the jurisdiction of an international legal order.

The negative effect doctrine discussed in this chapter deals with when, if ever, a state court will stay proceedings before it and refer disputants to the arbitrators for them to decide, in the first instance, whether an arbitration agreement between the parties (i) exists, (ii) is valid, and (iii) has a scope that covers the dispute in question. An affirmative answer on each of these points would mean that the dispute’s merits must be decided in arbitration. Thus, the negative effect issue concerns whether a decision on these three jurisdiction sub-issues should be decided with finality by the court itself at the outset, or, in the first instance, by the arbitrators themselves, with possible court review on jurisdiction delayed until later.The chapter discusses the dramatically different approaches to the negative effect issue followed in several leading arbitral jurisdictions: France, Germany, the U.S., Switzerland, the U.K., and Canada (Quebec).It also discusses the underlying policy issues at stake in the different national approaches to the doctrine.In conclusion the chapter offer’s the author’s view of a preferred approach to the negative effect issue.

The (positive) competence-competence principle is one of the most fundamental principles of international arbitration. It provides the arbitral tribunal with the competence to decide on its own competence. These positive effects relating to the jurisdiction and the competence of the arbitral tribunal are nearly universally recognized, contrary to the consequences following from it for the jurisdiction of the state courts. Despite the positive effect’s broad recognition, its justification raises difficult questions which touch the very basics of arbitration. The entry discusses the historic and conceptual background of the principle as well as some of the controversial questions as to its scope and the form, timing and requirements of an arbitral tribunal’s jurisdictional decision, setting out the approaches adopted in the various jurisdictions.

The socialist revolution in Russia introduced large-scale nationalisations and land reforms in order to empower the peasantry and the proletariat with a vision of establishing the ‘first worker’s state’.2 A key instrument in this undertaking was the nationalisation of private property, a transformation that was legal in nature. Indeed, as Scott Newton put it: ‘the elimination of private ownership of the means of production remains a breathtaking and unexampled demonstration of the puissance of law’.3