In general all matters of inter-corporate disputes are arbitrable under German law, provided that they are covered by a valid arbitration clause. Such an arbitration clause may be part of the articles of association of the company. There are no limitations as far as GmbHs and partnerships are concerned. However, the articles of association of a stock corporation, quoted on a stock exchange, may not contain an arbitration clause. They state courts have exclusive jurisdiction over disputes concerning the validity or nullity of shareholders' resolutions by such stock corporations. All other corporate disputes within a stock corporation may be covered by an individual arbitration agreement.

Eco Swiss leaves a very mixed impression. On the one hand, the factual implications of this case for arbitration might, after all, appear not so dramatic in practice. The ECJ has firmly demonstrated that it follows its precedents associated with a more self-restrained approach towards national procedural autonomy, at least as far as procedural restrictions in arbitration-related areas are concerned. Furthermore, the Court did not travel the more precarious path between the two suggested by the Advocate General. At present, one can only speculate about the repercussions for arbitration which the judgement would have inflicted, had the Court engaged in analysing the arbitrators' duties and powers to apply EC law or the extent of the supervisory functions of national courts in arbitration matters.

Intellectual property can have enormous value and is often an important asset on a company's balance sheet. As intellectual property plays an everincreasing role in the world economy, disputes over intellectual property ownership, validity, licensing, infringement etc. are also likely to become more frequent. Parties of different nationalities will inevitably be involved in these disputes and so international arbitration will increasingly provide an attractive option for intellectual property dispute resolution. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the benefits of taking intellectual property disputes to arbitration as opposed to having them decided in the courts, to explain some of the difficulties of arbitrating intellectual property questions and to introduce some of the features of the Arbitration Rules adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation that are especially useful in arbitration proceedings

Dispute resolution without looking into the eye of a ‘judge’ — can this be regarded as the way of the future, or should one rather concentrate on traditional court, arbitration or ADR proceedings?

As shown above, an online mechanism is risky and may have disadvantages vis-à-vis more traditional dispute resolution mechanisms. Therefore, ODR cannot become the only alternative of such proceedings, at least not in the current state of technical development and given the customs of a large number of the participants in e-commerce. Also, the necessary technical standards have their price, in particular where consumers are concerned. The only exceptions are proceedings in which very simple fact or law patterns must be adjudicated such as in the UDRP mechanism.

This paper deals with the effects that intermediation has on strategic behaviour in negotiations. To this end, we use the tools of game theory to analyse how different institutional settings can provide specific strategic incentives and thereby condition the outcome of negotiations. We concentrate on some very recent contributions, which have addressed gaps in this literature and stress the economic intuition behind some predicted behaviours.

Our notions of dispute resolution revolve around parties with competing contentions receiving some form of adjudication or resolution through settlement. A more accurate approach involves seeing disputes in a different way. At one extreme, we may have a case litigated before a country's Supreme Court. At the other, there may be the germs of a problem that nobody has articulated as such. This has the ability to become that court case. More likely, though, it will just wither away. An innocent victim may resolve to take his business elsewhere or even to desert an entire sector of commerce. He is no less in dispute than the serious litigant.