Maritime Arbitration Among Past, Present and Future

Maritime arbitration has been a practiced method of dispute resolution since remote times, particularly in Ancient Greece. During the Middle Ages the application of the lex maritima among seaborne traders resulted in a wide use of arbitration, as demonstrated by the provisions contained in the statutes of some Italian communes. In the following centuries arbitration remained quite popular until its definitive achievement in parallel with the rise of international uniform law. Maritime arbitration belongs to the genus of international commercial arbitration but it differs from the general model for a number of reasons, which make it somehow “special”: from the sources of law, to the kind of arbitrated disputes, to the characteristics of the maritime arbitral proceedings. Nowadays arbitration is widely used among international shipping operators to solve almost every kind of dispute and, consequently, arbitral clauses are included in many maritime contract forms. This is due to its remarkable advantages over litigation, such as flexibility, specialization, confidentiality and, more generally, possibility for the parties to determine every aspect of the procedure according to their needs. However, despite such benefits, there are some drawbacks and issues which affect contemporary arbitration and whose consequence is the increasing popularity of other mechanisms of dispute resolution, such as negotiation and mediation. In order to successfully defend its leading role in the next decades, maritime arbitration (and in particular London maritime arbitration) will necessarily have to make some changing, overcoming the proverbial reluctance to innovation of the maritime industry.