International arbitration postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in arbitration began with a dispute I never saw resolved. In my second year I worked through a contract law problem sheet involving a shipbuilding agreement, and the answer turned entirely on a clause nobody in the seminar wanted to discuss: the one sending the parties to arbitration in a city neither of them came from. I found that clause more interesting than the breach. It meant the parties had built a private courtroom for themselves in advance, choosing the rules, the language and the people who would decide. The question of how far the law should respect that choice has occupied me since.

I pursued it in my final-year dissertation, which compared how courts in England, France and Singapore approach challenges to awards based on alleged procedural unfairness. I chose the topic because I wanted to test an assumption I had absorbed from textbooks: that pro-arbitration jurisdictions simply intervene less. Reading the judgments themselves gave a more complicated picture. Courts were often willing to examine whether a tribunal had genuinely heard a party's case, while remaining unwilling to revisit the merits, and the line between those two things was drawn differently depending on how the relevant statute framed the tribunal's duties. Working out how to structure that comparison without either flattening the differences or losing the argument in detail was the hardest part of my degree, and the part I am most pleased with. My supervisor pushed me to narrow the scope twice, which improved it considerably.

My legal study has been broader than arbitration alone. Conflict of laws taught me to think carefully about jurisdiction and applicable law, which underpins almost every arbitration problem. Public international law introduced me to investor-state dispute settlement and the criticisms made of it regarding transparency and consistency. I have followed the UNCITRAL working group discussions on reform in general terms and want to study the subject properly rather than from summaries. I also read comparative material in French where I can, having worked through a vocabulary list of civil procedure terms over one summer; my reading is slow but improving, and it has made me more aware that common law assumptions about evidence and disclosure are not universal.

Since graduating I have worked as a paralegal at a four-partner commercial litigation firm. Most of my work is document review, chronologies and bundling, with occasional attendance at hearings. It is unglamorous, but it has taught me how a case is actually assembled: how much depends on someone noticing that an email is dated wrongly, and how differently a client understands a dispute compared with the lawyers advising them. One matter involved a supply contract with an arbitration clause, and I prepared a short note on the seat and institution for a supervising solicitor to check. That small task showed me how much I still have to learn about the interaction between institutional rules and national arbitration statutes.

At university I volunteered on a student mediation scheme, handling low-level disputes between housemates after a short training course. I was not resolving anything significant, but sitting between two people who had stopped listening to each other made me appreciate why parties value a process they have helped design. I have also built and maintained a spreadsheet-based reading log of arbitration cases for my own use, which sounds dull and has been genuinely useful.

I want the LLM to give me a systematic grounding in institutional rules, enforcement under the New York Convention, and the procedural choices tribunals make, with the aim of practising in international dispute resolution. I hope eventually to qualify and work on cross-border commercial disputes, and I would value the chance to study alongside people trained in other legal traditions.