This paper delves into the viability of artificial intelligence (AI) as a legal decision-maker through a controlled experiment involving two advanced language models: GPT-4o and Llama 3.1. Using a real-world Colombian arbitration case centred on contract disputes exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors test each model’s ability to generate legally sound arbitration awards. The experiment unfolds in two scenarios: the first provides only the factual background of the case and the second includes the legal arguments of both parties. Each model’s output is evaluated against Colombian legal standards to determine whether the resulting decisions could withstand annulment proceedings. The findings show that GPT-4o closely mirrors the reasoning and outcome of the actual arbitral award, applying doctrines like imprevisión and good faith with legal coherence. Llama 3.1, while capable of reproducing basic legal reasoning, displays limitations, particularly when limited to factual inputs. The results demonstrate that state-of-the-art AI can, under proper conditions, replicate complex legal reasoning and generate decisions unlikely to be overturned. The paper concludes that AI has the potential to serve as a decision-maker in certain adjudicatory contexts, warranting further exploration into its regulated use in arbitration and beyond.

This chapter examines the evolution and deployment of AI tools in the delivery of dispute resolution in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) with particular focus on arbitration. The chapter draws on publicly available original data to argue that there indeed is greater opportunity to deploy AI in arbitration as a tool for efficiency, which may lead to cost and time savings. It also explores the emerging regulation of these tools globally, regionally, and in some SSA countries and concludes that regulation of the use of AI must maintain the right balance of achieving efficiency in the process of arbitration and mitigation of its negative effects.

Private dispute resolution mechanisms – such as arbitration, mediation, and negotiation – are often criticised for high costs, lengthy proceedings, and inconsistent outcomes. Simultaneously, confidence in traditional courts is declining amid rising litigation expenses, delays, and concerns over impartiality, highlighting the need for more efficient and equitable resolution methods. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer promising tools to address these challenges. AI enhances case preparation through natural language processing (NLP), which organises documents, extracts key insights, and supports evidence analysis. Predictive analytics help anticipate outcomes based on past decisions, aiding strategic planning. AI also enables automation in routine case management, accelerating resolution and reducing costs. Generative AI further alleviates administrative burdens, enabling legal professionals to focus on complex legal reasoning and client interactions. This chapter examines how AI is reshaping private dispute resolution, with a focus on current applications, emerging innovations, and future developments. While AI cannot replace human judgement in complex disputes, it plays a vital role in streamlining procedures, promoting fairness, and improving user satisfaction.

This introduction offers an overview of the evolving role of artificial intelligence in civil dispute resolution, discussing current developments against the background of broader technological, regulatory and institutional contexts. It examines the dual forces of genuine innovation and persistent hype, clarifies the book’s open and technology-neutral definition of AI, and articulates an equally broad conception of civil dispute resolution encompassing adjudicative but also consensual, formal but also informal mechanisms. The introduction also outlines the book’s comparative ambition and structural organisation, ultimately framing AI as a transformative yet contested actor whose integration into justice systems demands careful, context-sensitive governance.

This chapter deals with the peaceful settlement of disputes. It considers first the diplomatic methods of dispute settlement, being negotiation between the parties, the use of good offices and mediation by a third party, inquiry by a third party and conciliation by a third party producing a non-binding report. Relevant international instruments and cases are noted. The role of regional organisations is then covered, examining the functions of the African Union, the Organization of American States, the Arab League, and the various European institutions. The position of the specialised agencies of the UN is noted. The chapter next turns to the settlement of international economic disputes from the World Trade Organization, regional institutions, the World Bank, to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and other mechanisms, including the use of bilateral investment treaties. Finally, the chapter considers arbitration as a binding method of third-party dispute settlement.

This chapter describes the WTO dispute settlement system, focusing on its structure, procedures, and recent challenges. The WTO system, established in 1995, was a significant innovation in international trade law, featuring mandatory jurisdiction and a detailed set of rules in the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU). It aimed to ensure adherence to WTO commitments and provide predictability to the trading system.However, recent US concerns over the Appellate Body’s functioning led to blocked appointments, rendering the Appellate Body defunct and the system non-binding. This crisis has led to the exploration of alternative mechanisms like the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) and increased reliance on regional trade agreement dispute settlement mechanisms.

Based on an in-depth analysis of a few selected cases of commercial dispute and litigation, this chapter illuminates the functioning of the complex and competing legal systems and the mechanisms of dispute resolution among merchants in Surat in western India and Zanzibar in East Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the dynamics of this legal space, the endurance of legal plurality and qualitative changes in it over the period under review. It critically examines the perceived binary between the legal plurality of the pre-colonial period and the legal uniformity and centralization of the colonial period. The chapter argues that merchants usually sought to resolve their commercial disputes through informal negotiations, petitions, arbitration and legal proceedings in courts of law. The analysis of commercial disputes show that despite the emergence of the European (English) colonial legal system across the Indian Ocean arena in the nineteenth century and the colonial state’s push to make the law uniform and implement a single legal system, the normative and customary mechanisms of adjudicating commercial disputes endured in the colonial period.

This chapter focuses on the American Revolution of 1775–1783, which often appears as the first cause célèbre in the subsequent literature on the law of civil war. Studying closely the legal documents and case law during the revolution, it argues that the revolution of the thirteen colonies displayed a typical structure of transatlantic civil wars that was common with the early modern civil wars of Chapter 1 as well as the subsequent transatlantic revolutions. Its key features include the early emergence of an insurgent prize jurisdiction, the diplomatic disputes caused by the imperial counter-revolutionary responses, the question of foreign intervention, and ultimately the connection between sovereignty and state responsibility. It also links these phenomena with the rise of international arbitration as an essential technique of post-revolutionary settlements in the classical law of nations.

Chapter 12 offers a provocative and jurisprudentially ambitious argument: that sovereign equality requires states to submit to international adjudication or arbitration even in ordinary legal disputes that do not involve overlapping sovereign rights or powers.

This chapter begins by elaborating on the concept of a dispute, before providing a historical perspective on the evolution of the requirement to settle disputes peacefully. The chapter then explores diplomatic and legal methods of dispute settlement. Diplomatic forms of dispute settlement (also known as political or non-legal forms of dispute settlement) include negotiation, mediation, inquiry, and conciliation. Legal forms of dispute settlement include arbitration and adjudication. Resort by states to dispute settlement procedures, and in particular legal methods of dispute settlement, has grown exponentially in the last decades. Since the 1990s, the International Court of Justice has had an increasingly active docket of cases; in addition, the Permanent Court of Arbitration has undergone a sort of renaissance. The focus of this chapter is on the settlement of inter-state disputes, as opposed to disputes between states and non-state actors or between non-state actors.

From the twelfth century, clergy enjoyed another privilege related to criminal violence. The canon ‘Si quis suadente’ (1139) declared that anyone who laid ‘violent hands’ on a clerk or monk incurred excommunication reserved to papal absolution. Historians have seen this sanction as ‘automatic’ and an expression of papal power, but recent scholarship has questioned this. Bishops enforcing the canon sought papal guidance on its operation: What kinds of clergy and violence was it meant to cover? Did it exclude some uses of force, notably self-defence? Did all offenders need papal absolution? Papal answers to such questions formed a new body of case law that complicated the canon’s operation and made it less automatic. Canonistic commentary added to this complexity, essentially giving bishops power to decide whether the canon’s sanction applied and whether offenders needed recourse to Rome. In English practice, offenders were rarely referred to Rome and usually received episcopal absolution. Church courts also encouraged reconciliation between clerical victims and lay assailants through arbitration, rather than emphasising division between them that the canon potentially signified.

This chapter will chart the early turbulent years after the Treaty of Managua, which gave Nicaragua sovereignty over an autonomous Mosquito Reserve. As Nicaragua attempted to consolidate and control the transit route, it pushed for greater incorporation of Greytown and the Reserve within the Republic. This chapter will follow the tense standoff between Nicaragua and the Mosquito Kingdom, which would ultimately be brought to international arbitration through British initiative. In this context, the opening of the Suez Canal sparked off renewed American interest leading to the Lull survey of 1872–1873, which underscored the paradoxical reality that as the struggle over the canal route and Mosquito Reserve threatened to become an international issue, the local conditions of Greytown were slowly making the entry point of the proposed canal route unnavigable. Ironically, Nicaragua’s efforts to leverage U.S. interests in the canal led to conflict with Guatemala’s aggressive unionism, undermining ideals of regional unity.

Chapter 9 examines the issue of whether and how foreign civil judgements against overseas-listed Chinese companies will be recognized and enforced in China. As overseas-listed Chinese companies usually have their main assets located in China, it is important that Chinese courts recognize and enforce foreign securities judgments. However, there are many difficulties in this area, which undermines the efficacy of the regulation of cross-border securities transactions. In quest of solutions, this chapter assesses the possibility of suing Chinese companies in the offshore financial centers where they are incorporated, finding that there would be similar issues with judgment enforcement in China. It also examines the viability of using arbitration as an alternative, arguing that arbitration may only supplement, rather than substitute, court litigation for resolving securities disputes.

Chapter 1 introduces the main issues raised in Labour Law and its social and economic significance in regulating workplace relations. The chapter introduces the principal sources of labour law in the UK, which include statutes, the common law and European law and the difficulties in securing compliance by employers with those laws. It describes the system of employment tribunals and ordinary courts where disputes are resolved. Finally the chapter introduces some contemporary themes concerning precarious work, work/life balance and human rights at work.

This chapter explores the growing prevalence of non-staff personnel within the UN system and the legal challenges they face in accessing justice. As non-staff personnel increasingly take on roles traditionally held by staff, they remain largely excluded from the jurisdiction of IATs and often may only avail themselves of arbitration clauses that can be prohibitive in practice. The chapter examines potential legal implications of this situation, such as functional immunity before domestic courts, as well as proposed solutions, such as alternative dispute mechanisms and expedited arbitration. It reviews current UN pilot projects aimed at providing non-staff personnel with informal dispute resolution avenues and discusses potential reforms to bridge the access-to-justice gap.

Chapter 6 aims to construct a future-looking theoretical framework for handling cultural objects for which questions of past illegality and/or illegitimacy arise but where a potential claimant – whether an individual, a community, or a source nation – is unable to pursue formal legal proceedings against the current possessor, and the relevant law enforcement agencies cannot equally pursue criminal, administrative, or public law proceedings. Accordingly, the chapter seeks to identify normative principles for dealing with the issue of “restitution” (broadly defined) that operates outside the realm of hard-law norms and institutions. It starts by examining the key aspects of the institutional/procedural and normative principles of the restitution committees established in certain European countries and tasked with the development and implementation of “just and fair solutions” to address Holocaust-era wrongful dispossessions. It then considers whether “just and fair solutions” can be devised for other contexts and, if so, how legalistic ethical reasoning could be adapted for these settings. The focus then shifts to the case study of France and its complex approach to the restitution of colonial-era objects to African source countries. The chapter then examines the various remedial mechanisms that are in operation, or that can be developed, to apply such normative principles to broader contexts of addressing past wrongs, including long-term loans, digital restitution, and the establishment of cross-border trusts to enable the joint custody and stewardship of collections. The chapter, and the book, conclude by addressing the role of such a normative blueprint, aligned with the concept of new cultural internationalism, in moving toward the convergence of law, policy, and markets for cultural property.

Social adaptation requires humans to respond to others’ nonverbal emotional cues by selecting and executing adaptive motor responses. In this chapter, we provide a general overview of how visual perception of others’ emotional expressions, particularly threatening faces and bodies, promotes rapid processing and elaboration of multiple opportunities for action, at different levels of complexity. Notably, we will highlight how subcortical and cortical neural pathways interact to flexibly orchestrate our social behavior in response to threatening expressions, ranging from simple stimulus-driven reactions to more elaborated goal-directed actions. We will review recent findings from research on humans and other animals and discuss clinical implications, as well as future challenges and perspectives.