Professor Rogers keynotes arbitration ethics conference in Turkey

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Catherine A. Rogers, professor of law and the Marjorie Price Faculty Scholar at Penn State Law, attended the ISTA Ethic Rules for Arbitrators Ethics, Latest Developments and Innovations in Arbitration Conference, held by Istanbul Arbitration Association (ISTA) on Nov. 16, as keynote speaker and panelist.  She delivered her speech “Ethics in International Arbitration” and sat as a panelist in the ISTA Ethics Rules session.

ISTA is a nongovernmental organization bringing together the law offices, lawyers, attorneys, academicians, experts, and sectoral specialists who are active in the field of arbitration under the name of arbitrator, attorney, expert, etc., under its umbrella as an expertise association. Among ISTA’s founders is Penn State Law alumnus Hayati Irkicatal ’14 LL.M., a former student and research assistant of Rogers. Irkicatal was also in the organization committee of the conference.

In her speech, Rogers stressed the importance of ethics of arbitration players (arbitrators, parties, counsels and experts) for a fair and decent arbitration process. She pointed out the necessity of having fair and unbiased information about arbitrators’ ethical compliance.

In the panel session, Rogers represented Arbitrator Intelligence, a Penn State-related entity that aims to promote fairness, transparency, and accountability in the arbitrator selection process, and to facilitate increased diversity in arbitrator appointments. Arbitrator Intelligence invites parties and counsel at the conclusion of arbitration cases to complete the Arbitrator Intelligence Questionnaire to solicit feedback on how the arbitrators managed and decided the cases. The questionnaire is designed to replicate, through this feedback data, the kinds of information about arbitrators’ case management and decisional history that is currently gathered through ad hoc person-to-person phone calls. When sufficient information is collected, Arbitrator Intelligence will make it available to the international arbitration community through “AI Reports.”

The ISTA event gathered many arbitration practitioners, scholars of international arbitration, and law students from different law schools in Turkey. Two of the attendees were alumni Idil Tumer ’14 J.D. and Ilker Fatih Kil ’13 LL.M.

In addition to her position at Penn State Law, Rogers serves as professor of ethics, regulation & the rule of law and director of the Institute for Ethics, Regulation & the Rule of Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is co-chair of the ICCA-Queen Mary Task Force on Third-Party Funding in International Arbitration, which was released in April, and a reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, the U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration