ASIL/ITA Conference on the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at 25

I will be speaking tomorrow in Washington at the ASIL/ITA conference on “The Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at 25: The Cases Everyone Needs to Know for Investor-State and International Arbitration.” Details about the conference are available here.



I served as a judicial law clerk for one of the American judges at the Tribunal in the early 1990s and continue to be impressed by the work of that tribunal, despite its many shortcomings. In particular, having focused on expropriations and breaches of contracts by the government of Iran arising out of the Iranian revolution, I have always been reluctant to draw sharp distinctions between commercial private international law and public international human rights law. Observing the harm caused to individuals and businesses as a result of the Iranian government’s misadventures, it seems the harm is quite real to all victims of wars and revolutions.



I will be addressing the topic of evidentiary standards before the Tribunal.