On 13 April 2022, a select group of UM students* engaged in a negotiation exercise with law students from Texas A&M University Law School. The case involved a US-based oil company investing in/collaborating with a Mexican state-owned petroleum company managed and operated by the Mexican government. The complex case required the students to negotiate on challenging issues related to the law applicable to the arbitration, the seat of arbitration, waiver of sovereign immunity, application of USMCA, ICSID and New York Convention, and the fair and just way of calculating compensation in the event of expropriate/nationalization just to mention a few issues that they dealt with.
This was an intense crash course for most - if not all of the students - but these wonderful, hardworking (and dare I say, wicked smart) students represented not only their fictional client, but also our faculty and the university unbelievably well. A very special thanks to my co-conspirator, Guillermo Garcia Sanchez at Texas A&M and their fantastic JD students. I am very much looking forward to making this partnership a more routine collaboration!
* Guillaume Libbrecht, Ivona Petkova, Mila Grönros, Natalie Benou, Chloe Nursimhulu, Begum Kilimcioglu, Masa Samardzic, Kriton Papastergiou, Kerolos Gebraiel, and Ludovica Lacasella!