Introduction

Detlev Vagts continually impresses us with the serious clarity by which he interweaves the precise details of a complicated fact pattern with a broader analysis of their legal and policy implications. The catalogue of his learning includes mainline concerns like corporations and taxation, innovative tools for teaching international business law and historical analysis on the wartime comportment of neutrals or the legal system of the Third Reich.

Professional rectitude has also found its way into the scholarly territories where Detlev has left his intellectual footprint. His service as Chair of a Task Force on legal ethics led him to address several aspects of ethics for both adjudicators (judges and arbitrators) and lawyers (advocates and advisers). With characteristic insight, he sensed that small study groups and legal education programmes commended themselves as an essential preamble to guidelines and codes, but only ‘when the time is ripe’.

In the spirit of that work on professional ethics, this brief contribution to the honour of Vagts' scholarship looks at some of the salient deontological problems that implicate international arbitration, particularly when individuals move between roles as arbitrators and advocates. The modest hope is not to fix standards (the time is not ripe), but to take the first step of identifying issues and perhaps signalling some wrong directions and problematic solutions.