Private International Law and Arbitral Jurisdiction

International commercial arbitration and litigation are often seen as competing fora, fields of law, or markets. This intersection is at its highest at the forefront of any proceedings, at the jurisdictional stage. The analysis of jurisdictional issues at the forefront of an arbitration has been confined in a descriptive analysis of the law and jurisprudence, dealing with jurisdictional intersections almost in a mechanistic manner. These are not, however, issues which can be treated as mere mechanical rules. They are issues pertaining to core notions of authority, sovereignty, their origins and their allocation. At the same time, the pragmatic and practical domination of party autonomy is a fact which cannot be disregarded when one considers the normative and theoretical foundations of any model of dealing with these issues. This book moves beyond an analysis of arbitration and jurisdiction clauses to reconcile theory and practice, and provides an underlying theoretical model to exp