Arbitration in Italy: A two-headed Janus?

This study, based on fourteen interviews to professionals, seeks to explore facets of arbitration practice in Italy. In particular, these narratives have revealed that arbitration has become similar to litigation for four main reasons, i.e. the poor or insufficient knowledge of arbitration, the nature of arbitration itself which is deemed to be another form of litigation , the perception that litigation is better equipped to resolve disputes and the idea that amicability has little or nothing to do with arbitration. This paper also describes some of the linguistic realizations in the corpus, such as the use of Latin expressions and direct speech acts embedded into the narratives themselves. This seems to convey the idea that Italian legal practitioners are so deeply involved in litigation that they tend to use pragmatic devices and lexical items typical of litigation even when narrating their personal experiences in arbitration.