Biography: Arbitration

Carl Salans is a founding partner of the Salans law firm, now retired. He remains active as an international arbitrator. The firm which he co-founded with two partners in 1978 now has 800 lawyers of 25 different nationalities with offices in over 20 countries around the world. Previously, Mr Salans had served in the US Department of State as deputy legal adviser, where he was, inter alia, legal adviser to the US delegation to the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam (1968-1972) and US representative to the UNESCO conference to negotiate the World Heritage Convention (1972).

He has degrees from Harvard University (AB, 1954), Trinity College, Cambridge University (UK) (MA, LLB 1956 & 1958), and the University of Chicago Law School (JD, 1957). He is a member of the Paris, Illinois and District Court of Columbia bars. Mr Salans has served over the course of the past 40 years as chairman and co-arbitrator in arbitral tribunals and as counsel in well over 100 international arbitrations under a variety of institutional and ad hoc arbitral rules including the ICC, LCIA, AAA, ICSID, Netherlands Arbitration Institute, Vienna Economic Chamber and UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules. His cases have involved a broad variety of disputes arising out of mergers and acquisitions, joint venture agreements, distribution and agency contracts, investor state investments, oil, gas and mining projects, etc.

He has, for the past 12 years been a vice-chairman of the ICC International Court of Arbitration and, in 1998, was chairman of the ICC Court. He is also an alternative judge of the Iran-US Claims Tribunal in The Hague.

Mr Salans conducts arbitrations in English and French.