TILEC Seminar: Horst Eidenmueller

Biography

Horst Eidenmüller  , Oxford University

Horst Eidenmüller joined the Faculty of Law as a Visiting Professor in 2009 and took up a Chair for Commercial Law and a Professorial Fellowship at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 2015.

Eidenmüller was born in Munich, Germany. He obtained an LLM at Cambridge University (1989) and a PhD from Munich University (1994) after working for McKinsey & Co. in the 1990s. After his Habilitation in 1998, he was a law professor at the University of Münster from 1999 until 2003. From 2003 to 2014, he held the Chair for Private Law, German, European and International Company Law at Munich University. This position was designated as a research professorship under the excellence scheme of the German Research Foundation from 2007 to 2011.

Eidenmüller’s main research areas are contract law, company and bankruptcy law, and alternative dispute resolution. He is known for his economic and empirical analysis of important problems in these fields.

Eidenmüller has held visiting positions at major other universities such as Cambridge (2007), Harvard (2011), NYU (2013 and 2015), Stanford (2014) and Columbia (2018). From 2008 to 2009, he was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Eidenmüller is a Research Associate of the European Corporate Governance Institute (since 2009) and a Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (since 2008). As member of expert committees, he has advised the European Commission and the Federal Republic of Germany on issues of company and insolvency law reform. He has also acted as arbitrator in more than 40 commercial disputes (DIS, ICC, UNCITRAL, Ad Hoc) and as mediator in more than 60 commercial disputes since 1995.

In Oxford he lectures on Corporate Insolvency Law, on Comparative Corporate Law, and on Commercial Dispute Resolution (Commercial Negotiation and Mediation, International Commercial Arbitration).

What is an Arbitration?

Artificial Intelligence and the Vanishing Human Arbitrator

Horst Eidenmüller and Faidon Varesis

Technological developments, especially digitization, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain technology, are currently disrupting the traditional format and conduct of arbitrations. Stakeholders in the arbitration market explore how new technologies and tools can be deployed to increase the efficiency and quality of the arbitration process. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerates this trend. In this essay, we analyze the “Anatomy of an Arbitration”. We argue that, functionally, fully AI-powered arbitrations will be both technically feasible and should be permitted by the law at some point in the future. There is nothing in the concept of an arbitration that requires human control, governance, or even input. We further argue that the existing legal framework for international commercial arbitrations, the “New York Convention” (NYC) in particular, is capable of adapting to and accommodating fully AI-powered arbitrations. We anticipate significant regulatory competition between jurisdictions to promote technology-assisted or even fully AI-powered arbitrations, and we argue that this competition would be beneficial. In this competition, we expect that common law jurisdictions will enjoy an advantage: machine learning applications for legal decision-making can be developed more easily for jurisdictions in which case law plays a pivotal role.

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