8 - Introduction to the Age of Autonomy

Summary

This chapter provides an overview of the third period in the modern history of international commercial arbitration. This period, which started in the 1950s, is the Age of Autonomy. It has been marked by at least three types of autonomy. The first is the autonomy of the mercatocracy, a distinct class of professionals who, having devoted an increasing amount of time and attention to international commercial arbitration, see themselves as experts in international arbitration. A second (and related) type of autonomy is that of the field as a whole. Lawyers, scholars, and professors who had hitherto considered international arbitration as a subcategory of civil procedure or international law started viewing the discipline as a full-fledged field of practice and research. The third kind of autonomy is that of the law expounded by these experts and academics through such concepts as lex mercatoria and the arbitral legal order, which can be seen as attempts to give arbitration a theoretical foundation and explain its development as a system of law in its own right.