How to use this Page

The annual Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) International Arbitration Moot gathers academics and practitioners from around the world to discuss developments and gain a greater understanding of growing international investment, the creation of international investment treaties, domestic legislation, and international investment contracts.

The FDI Moot occurs over the course of six months, and includes regional rounds, which took place in August in New Delhi, Seoul, and Buenos Aires, and concludes with the global finals. Global finals venues rotate each year between Frankfurt, Malibu, Boston, and London.

The 2014 final hearing will be held 24-26 October at Pepperdine University School of Law in Malibu, California. In this phase, 48 teams from the South Asia, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa, North America, Europe and the Middle East regions will compete in the global oral argument preliminary rounds followed by the quarter final, semifinal, and final rounds.

Established practitioners and academics in the international arbitration, investment regulation, construction law, and international economic law fields act as arbitrators or memorandum judges throughout the competition. The arbitrators facilitate hearings during the oral arguments while the memorandum judges assess and score memorials one month before the oral arguments. Oxford University Press will be awarding prizes for the best memorial and counter memorial.

With three days of oral arguments, this year’s FDI Moot promises to be a busy and exciting weekend. In addition, Malibu, often described as “27 miles of scenic beauty,” is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and Santa Monica Mountains, so don’t forget to take some time to check out area attractions.

• Late October, with an average high temperature of 69°F/21°C, is perfect for exploring one of Malibu’s many beaches. Check out the famous Surfrider Beach and the nearby Malibu Pier.
• If you’re interested in taking a hike, plan an excursion to Point Mugu State Park, which has more than 70 miles of trails in the Santa Monica Mountains.
• Looking for a day trip? In just 20-30 minutes by car, you can visit Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley.

If you’ll be joining us in Malibu, stop by the Oxford University Press booth where you can browse our journals collection and take advantage of the 20% conference discount on all books. We’re also offering one month of free access to our collection of online law products for all attendees. Looking to brush up on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties in BIT arbitrations in time for the Moot? Check out the recording of our recent Investment Claims Webinar session and accompanying slides.

To follow the latest updates about the 2014 FDI Moot, follow us on Twitter @OUPIntLaw and at the hashtags #FDI14 #FDIMOOT14, and don’t forget to like the FDI Moot Facebook page.

See you in Malibu!

Heading image: Willem C. Vis pre moot at Palacky University of Olomouc by Cimmerian praetor. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Preparing for the 2014 FDI International Arbitration Moot appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• Navanethem Pillay on what are human rights for
• A Halloween horror story : What was it? Part 4
• Coded letters reveal an illicit affair and a woman of substance

 

I know some time ago I mentioned that I could probably do a blog just about hiking and I guess I really wasn't kidding. So, because a good half of my blog focuses on hiking, I thought I'd add the word "hiking" to the subtitle. Anyway, my husband had the last week off work and I got absolutely no work done, but, naturally, we did do quite a bit of hiking . On Monday, we went to Topanga State Park and hiked the Santa Ynez Canyon Trail. The trail starts out high up in the hills and gradually winds down into a heavily wooded canyon. Taking a left at a fork in the trail, the path leads to a waterfall. We strayed off the beaten path a bit and followed the stream, boulder-hopping to reach the waterfall. At one point in the creek, the boulders are just high enough that we needed to use some knotted ropes that had been left there to help pull ourselves up to higher ground. The waterfall was no more than a trickle just like every waterfall we've encountered this summer, but unlike the many creek-beds we've seen, this one did run with water.
Taking the same trail, we made our way back to the car. As we came over the crest of the last hill, the land opened out into dry, grassy meadows. We spotted a lone deer grazing not too far away. I tried to get as close to it as I could without alarming it, shooting pictures along the way. When that deer disappeared from view, we continued on our way, but stopped again shortly when we heard something sizeable crashing through the brush. Another deer came into view! And another and another - a herd of eight deer in all wandered out from the cover of forest into the open meadow. We shot many photos, but the deer were so well camouflaged that they are difficult to see in the photos. When they finally slipped out of view, we made our way through a live oak grove back to the car. We'd been so tired from the long hike, but after we paused and watched the deer for a while we felt energized all over again. It's so exhilarating to see wildlife in their natural habitat.


Malibu Creek
On Friday we went hiking again, this time we started out at the parking lot for Piuma Ridge. There seemed to be endless little side-trails that led to who-knows-where. We made our way north, entered into a smallish live oak grove, and got a glimpse of a water reclamation facility. After nosing around for a bit, we decided to try to find our way through Tapia Park and into Malibu Creek State Park, intending our final destination to be the Mott Adobe Ruins. We took a trail that seemed logical, but turned into a dead-end at a locked gate. So we had to double back, find a trail not marked on the map and carefully pick our way across a narrow strip of the creek. We had made it into Tapia and ended up hiking right next to a long road/parking lot which then ended abruptly at a camp. According to the map we had, the camp appeared to have been plunked down right in the middle of the road we wanted to take and of course it was gated, so the desirable road was completely off-limits. We were so lost we even asked for help. Unfortunately the person we asked wasn't all that familiar with the trails, so we took a guess at which trail to take. And we guessed right! We took a segment of the Backbone Trail that traversed up the side and over a mountain right into Malibu Creek State Park. Not too far into the park, we spotted six deer grazing on a patch of green grass. We were as close as we'd ever been to the creatures and shot a lot of photos. The buck seemed to become a bit unnerved by us and bounded gracefully away across the road. It was as if he was telling his herd that he wasn't terrified, but thought it best to move on. The rest of them seemed unperturbed, but gradually followed him. We did finally come across the Mott Ruins. There wasn't much left of them, save the chimney. It seemed a bit of a disappointment after spending much of the day being lost in trying to find it. On the way back we crossed a broad meadow were a whopping fifteen deer were grazing. This sight alone made the trek well worth while!


Temescal Canyon
So then yesterday we went back to Topanga State Park and hiked Temescal Canyon Trail which is on the southern side of the park in Malibu. It was a really beautiful location, but it was just full of people - probably the most we've ever encountered during a hike. With all the people there was no chance of encountering wildlife. The trail leads out to a meager California waterfall and then loops back to the parking lot switch-backing along a mountainside. At the top of the mountain, there's a path that traverses the ridge and ends at Skull Rock. Usually look-out points in these various parks offer sweeping views of the ocean or more mountains, but this trail featured views of the city. Very pretty, but a bit too busy.

On a more artistic note, last night we watched the anime movie Tekkonkinkrete. Even if you're not really into anime it's definitely worth a watch for the backgrounds alone. They are just stunning. I would never in a million years have the patience to paint such amazingly detailed backgrounds. Wish we'd caught it on the big screen... Read the rest of this post

I know I just wrote in my last post that we weren't going to go to Point Mugu until October so we could catch the sycamores in their full glory, but we've sort of run out of coastal parks to visit, so this past weekend we caved in hiked part of Point Mugu. It's gradually getting cooler, but it's still just warm enough to prevent us from doing some of the more inland hiking. Fortunately, Point Mugu is a huge park, so we'll likely come back to hike more of the trails and maybe we'll get another glimpse of the sycamores.

So we started up Big Sycamore Canyon Trail, thinking we'd try to keep to the shade that canyon trails usually offer and then we took a right a a fork in the path onto the Serrano Canyon Trail. It was a good choice as the trail was heavily wooded for a long way and offered much shade. Eventually, the trail winds up out of the canyon and opens onto a vast, grassy meadow surrounded by mountains on all sides.

I generally think that I prefer hiking through woods, but I always find myself so contented trekking through open grassland listening to the wind rustle through the dry grass - it's one of my favorite sounds.

The trail began to climb up out of the valley, back into the mountains. We took a left at another fork in the road, thinking this narrow path would take us back to the main fire road. As it turned out, we were very much off-the-beaten-path on what resembled a deer path cut through dense short, woody trees. My bare arms took quite a lashing from those dry branches. A machete would have been very handy at this point! We continued on the trail despite misgivings just to see where it would take us and ended up on a promontory with a great view, but no way down to the fire road. So we had to make our way back through the brush to the more well-worn trail. After quite a bit more trekking we made it back to the fire road. We still had another two or three miles to go to get back to the parking lot and we were pretty tired already. But, at least the fire road was pretty flat - no major hills to climb. I think this was our longest hike yet. I'm estimating it at seven or eight miles. We were really feeling it by the end! I really liked this park - maybe we'll come back and hike a little more of it next weekend!

I got a new camera - yay! It's my early Christmas present - I just couldn't wait that long to have a working camera, so we broke down and bought a new Canon PowerShot A570IS. And I was able to try it out a bit this weekend. We went to Corral Canyon in Malibu. For us, the hike was kind of 'been there, done that' - almost indistinguishable from some of the other coastal trails we've hiked before. It was a 2.5 mile loop with great ocean views for a good half or more of the hike. The coolest part of the trail, to me, was toward the finish, down in the canyon where there's a chimney standing alone, jutting out of the ground. I love stumbling across remnants of civilization past both ancient and modern.












I'm looking forward to a cooler fall and winter so we can tackle some of the non-coastal parks. I've been saving Point Mugu (which is partially coastal) until the fall since I hear it has beautiful sycamores come October. Autumn's my favorite season and I plan on making an effort to seek out the little pockets of Fall where they can be found in this arid climate that is LA.

So, we got some hiking in this weekend and since the camera seems to only work for my husband nowadays, I had him shoot all the pictures this time. And it worked - well, sort of. A good number of the pictures turned out, but several just turned out black. Fortunately, I don't feel like we're missing too much though. We went to Zuma Canyon this weekend and I'd say it was one of the more ordinary hikes - nothing really unusual about this place. I suppose the defining feature was a broad, dry creek-bed that criss-crossed with the path several times.

We really wore ourselves out on the "Ocean View Trail," not realizing that it would be straight uphill for a long time with no shade. It was pleasant as always, but I think we probably won't go back to this one to finish up the other trails. I'd really like to go back to Malibu Creek and finish the rest of the trails there, but it's just been too hot to do more inland hiking recently.



On the art side of things, I have a couple of pieces in progress right now:
This one is The Blackberry Princess. Some time ago, Chris read a fairy-tale to me titled "The Blackberry Princess," and although I can't recall at all what took place in the story, the title stuck with me and I've wanted to illustrate it ever since. I've only just recently came up with the visual to go with the title.

And this one just popped into my head while I was working on The Blackberry Princess. I have no idea what's going on in this one. I guess I just really wanted to draw more tangled hair. I've tentatively titled it The Injured Sparrow, but who knows if that sparrow is really injured or if he's just a diversion so his buddies can make off with strands of her hair for their nests. Or maybe they're the ones who tangled it up in the first place. Either way, she'd better not pull... Read the rest of this post

Well, a belated Happy 4th of July to all those celebrating. Hope everyone had a relaxing day off. We lazed about the house, watched neighborhood fireworks from our balcony, and finished the evening off watching "Miss Potter" which I very much enjoyed. As a children's illustrator, I'm somewhat mortified to admit that I think I've only read one or two of Beatrix Potter's books, although I adore the illustrations. We have a book that's a collection of a few stories, but I think I'd like to get the entire collection in the small format in which they were originally printed. I think I'll add it to my Amazon wishlist...

Still no new art to show - hope to be back with some soon. So I'll post some pictures of this past weekend's hike. The beginning of the trail in Solstice Canyon (Malibu) was paved and followed a spring-fed stream. The scenery was nice, but kind of ho-hum - nothing we hadn't seen before. After a while we came upon the ruins of the Roberts' house and things started getting interesting. The house was just about completely gone, but patios and portions of walls and a ridiculous number of fireplaces dotted the landscape:












Just beyond the ruins, and upstream, the creek consists of a series of multi-level rock-pools and small waterfalls decorated with maidenhair fern. We decided to boulder-hop our way upstream to see what we could see.












After a long walk along the creek took a couple different side trails both of which traveled up out of the canyon and along the mountainsides into dryer terrain and sweeping views of the land and ocean.












We traveled back down into the canyon, boulder-hopped a portion of the stream that we hadn't seen yet and then, exhausted, took the next opportunity we had to get back onto a level trail to head back to the car. I'd love to go back after some rainfall - some people we ran into said the water level of the stream used to be significantly higher in the past and that there used to be really great swimming holes all along the creek. There's also supposed to be a 150' waterfall at the end of a different trail - maybe we'll come back some day for that one!

After fighting with mediocre photo-importing software, we broke down a got a card-reader so I could finally post some pictures. These are from last week when we went hiking at Escondido Canyon in Malibu:
Escondido Canyon in two words: poison oak. A lot of the parks around here have quite a bit of poison oak, but Escondido seemed to have the mother-load. That aside, the scenery was very pretty and chock full of wildlife! We saw two California Mountain King Snakes (the red, black, and yellow ones that look similar to the deadly coral snake, but are actually harmless!), another type of snake, and two deer. We were only a few feet away from one deer as it made it's way across the side of a hill.

The trail repeatedly crosses a meandering creek and ends up at the 150' Escondido Falls which is the highest in the Santa Monica Mountains. There wasn't much by way of water at this waterfall perhaps because of the severe drought we've been experiencing... It was more of a trickle.

This last picture is of the falls, but it's probably hard to tell since there was so little water. It'd be nice to go back just after some rain to see how the falls might look during a more typical year.


Now for the sketches - these are just a couple of real quickies drawn up from some old thumbnails in my sketchbook:













A little ACEO and a simple Christmas card. I'm not so sure about the card, though. I think "Santa Moon" looksa bit creepy...

I don't have any new sketches or paintings to post this week, but we did go hiking this weekend, so I guess I'll post that. I really could just blog about hiking, given how much of it we've been doing these days. On Sunday, we drove over to Arroyo Sequit in Malibu. We took Westlake Blvd. for a good part of the drive which unbeknownst to us was a long series of hair-pin turns and certainly not for the weak of stomach.

Signs at the beginning of the trail warned of this being mountain lion country. We didn't see any mountain lions, but we did see a lot of speckled lizards and one horned toad. The trail itself was pretty short, about a mile and a half plus a brief detour.

It was so quiet there. You could hear the wind blowing through the pines - one of my favorite sounds, reminiscent of my childhood.

The trail afforded lots of great, sweeping views of the valley and mountains in the distant, as well as some huge satellite dishes. The detour close to the end of the trail led us to a paved which actually went right up to the dishes, which appeared to be the property of AT&T. It's always so strange to be surrounded by nature and then stumble across something very much man-made and very high-tech - seems so out of place.

Another odd aspect to hiking in LA is that we live in this incredibly dense, heavily paved urban jungle, but if we drive for twenty minutes or so, we're suddenly in the middle of nowhere. Driving through the mountains really feels like back-country where there might be a pocket of houses or a small town, but mostly wilderness. I can almost forget that I'm really right, smack in the middle of one of the country's largest cities. It really is quite strange when you think about it.

We were planning on doing a much longer hike at Chesebro Canyon on Monday, but we decided to get into a car accident instead. It really was unfortunate - we were barely two blocks from our home when we all stopped short just past an intersection and ended up in a three-car pile-up. We were the sandwich car and took the most damage. We'll probably have to replace 'Sophia.' My husband is sad - she's been a good car for a very long time. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. We were all walking around, talking coherently right afterward, although we were all badly shaken up. We both woke up feeling really sore today. Hopefully, we'll feel better soon and get the lack-of-car situation figured out this weekend. Dreading car-shopping...

I guess I should try to get some painting done today so I actually have some art to post next time!