Lord Briggs looks at the future of dispute resolution

In a speech entitled “Dispute Resolution in Uncertain Times”, delivered in January at the Peace Palace in The Hague, Lord Briggs discusses dispute resolution in the context of globalism.

Lord Briggs suggests that European jurisprudence will continue to “to play an important part in the further development of the common law” following Brexit as it already has in the past. He notes that, according to many legal historians, its doctrines were part of “William the Conqueror’s baggage”.

The Supreme Court justice states: “Much of our commercial law was, after its abolition as separate law, with separate courts, in the form of the lex mercatoria in the seventeenth century, re-imported from mainly European sources by the great Lord Mansfield and his successors in the eighteenth century, a process which continued throughout the nineteenth century, as is exemplified in Goodwin v Robarts in 1875.

Lord Briggs adds: “After citing from Florentine and Venetian medieval mercantile custom and from then contemporary German and French jurisprudence, Chief Justice Cockburn said that this was a process by which proven international usage among merchants and traders could become engrafted upon the common law.

“More recent cases in which the common law has been shaped by having regard to European jurisprudence are legion. They include the penalties case referred to above, the development of the public law doctrine of legitimate expectation, and even Lord Diplock’s now classic common law division of contracts into unilateral and synallagmatic used terms borrowed from the French Civil Code.”

Read the full speech on the Supreme Court website