Acquiring a grasp of the law of international commercial arbitration is prodigiously difficult. Legal problems can, in principle, arise under the laws of any state; and arbitrators are prone to refer not only to the laws of foreign states but also to the practice of the many international arbitral tribunals in order to justify their decisions. Reducing this vast body of potentially relevant practice to manageable proportions requires a rare skill and an exceptional dedication to hard and painstaking research. Those who have contributed to the pres