The arbitral tribunal’s authority to determine the applicable law in international commercial arbitration: patterns and trends

Party autonomy prevails in determining the law applicable to the procedure and to the merits in international commercial arbitration. Nevertheless, when parties fail to make a choice or fail to reach an agreement, the arbitral tribunal has the authority to determine the applicable law. The paper’s aim is to present the legal grounds for this authority, its extent and limits, and how it works in practice. In order to reach this, aim the paper starts with a general analysis of the said legal grounds (the parties’ agreement, international instruments, arbitration rules, national laws on arbitration), then continues with an analysis of the limits imposed on the arbitral tribunal’s authority, which is large but not unlimited, and in the end looks at how this authority is exercised in practice, by scrutinizing recent jurisprudence and boiling down patterns and trends. The study will contribute to a better understanding of the current practice and trends in international commercial arbitration as regards arbitral tribunal’s authority to determine the law applicable to the procedure and the merits of a dispute.