International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Call for Papers

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law -  Call for Papers

Special Issue on :

International Arbitration 

in the Digital World

Guest Editors: 

Vijay K. Bhatia, Chinese University of Hong Kong 

Magdalena Łągiewska, University of Gdańsk, Poland 

This call for papers is intended to exchange views in the field of international commercial arbitration with a focus on law, language, and communication in the digital world. The aim of the intended special issue is to promote a comprehensive and cutting-edge analysis of recent developments, issues, and challenges in the field. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the dispute resolution landscape, including international arbitration. Therefore, instead of traditional functioning of arbitral tribunals, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the entire process of digitalization and paved the way for further development of online arbitration. It seems that the digitalization (i.e., collecting of e-evidences, online hearing, etc.) has become an inevitable process and will have an impact on the global arbitration systems and practices. This begs the question of whether the online hearings and e-platforms comply with the cybersecurity measures. Do they guarantee the data protection of e-evidences? What are the specific solutions adopted by the international commercial and investment arbitral institutions worldwide? What kind of impact this has on the discursive construction of discourses of arbitration? What are the implications of social media on some of the key aspects of arbitration, such as privacy, authenticity, and transparency? In addition, there are new trends emerging in international arbitration such as third-party funding, arb-med-arb mechanisms and new types of disputes that could be handled by arbitral tribunals, such as Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, and technology disputes, such as those involving cryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. These are some of the key developments that we would like to explore in the proposed issue of International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. 

The special issue will focus on both theoretical as well as practice-based approaches to international arbitration, based on a comprehensive and cutting-edge analysis across different legal systems with a special focus on recent developments, issues, and challenges facing the alternative dispute resolution institutions. We specifically invite submissions with a focus on 2 issues covering law, language, and communication in arbitration contexts including, but not necessarily limited to, the following: 

•   Digitalization in international commercial and investment arbitration, 

•   Third-party funding in international commercial and investment arbitration, 

•   New types of disputes handled by arbitral tribunals, 

•   Discursive construction of arbitration processes in various digital modes. 

Submissions following these themes as well as other possible ways of analysis related to the above topics should be submitted to 

-   Magdalena Łągiewska (magdalena.lagiewska@ug.edu.pl),

and 

-   Vijay K. Bhatia (vjkbhatia1@gmail.com). 

Maximum length: no longer than 10,000 words, including footnotes, summary, references etc. 

•   Deadline for Abstracts (Max 500 words):       30th August 2022 

•   Decisions on acceptance:                             31st October 2022 

•   Deadline for full papers:                               30th of April 2022