Litigation Procedures in Arbitral Practice: A case of Arbitral Litigation?

In the UK, international arbitration has had a long tradition which reached its peak with the Arbitration Act 1996. The provisions of the Act represent the first written legislation on this issue in the UK (Tessuto 2003), a country with a common law system. A specific Act was necessary due to the fact that, in the 1990s, arbitration in the UK needed to be made simpler and clearer so as to facilitate the whole arbitral process, render it less expensive and at the same time reduce the intervention of the court. Yet, to date, arbitration in England is regarded as a long and costly process because it follows court procedures (Rees 2007). Indeed, arbitral proceedings are becoming more and more like court trials, thus increasing the judicialization trend of arbitration (Brower 2008). The purpose of this paper is to present evidence in support of the hypothesis of the “colonization” of litigation procedures in arbitral practices in the international commercial context. To attain this goal, the paper will investigate legal aspects (content vs. formulaic expressions) which have caused a modification of English arbitration practices in terms of intentions, purposes, and processes.