ABSTRACT
Rapid transformations at the global level in the last two decades have challenged the nature of international legal practice. Among such transformations is the rapid growth of international commercial arbitration as a means of resolving transnational disputes. International arbitration is a specially established mechanism for the binding determination of disputes concerning international contractual relationships. As an emerging mechanism of global dispute-resolution, it provides an avenue to understand the impact of globalization on the international practice of law in East Asian and Western countries. In exploring the impact of globalization on international arbitration practice, two forces-principally those of “harmonization” and “legal diversity”—provide a helpful lens to observe the dynamic nature of international arbitration in the context of diverse societies.18 Anne Marie Slaughter, in her book A New World Order, describes how legal networks such as those associated with international legal practice have proliferated in recent years (Slaughter, 2004). She describes how these networks offer “a fl exible and relatively fast way to conduct the business of global governance, coordinating and even harmonizing national government action while initiating and monitoring different solutions to global problems.”19 On the one hand, these networks promote “convergence,” while on the other hand they also allow for “informed divergence.”20 Such interactions are founded on the basis of what she calls the foundational norm of “global deliberative equality.”21 She cites Michael Ignatieff, who derives this concept from the basic moral precept that “our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it is entitled to equal moral consideration.”22
