Junior faculty member wins international publisher's award

Professor Joshua Karton with the book prize presented to him at the first ICLQ Lecture at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law on May 19 in London, England

Professor Joshua Karton has received the inaugural International and Comparative Law Quarterly (ICLQ) Young Scholars Prize. His article, “Contract Law in International Commercial Arbitration: The Case of Suspension of Performance,” was selected by the editorial board of ICLQ and Cambridge University Press as the most outstanding submission by an author under the age of 35.

Karton, pleasantly “surprised” by the award, received the news a week before he returned to Cambridge to defend his PhD thesis, taking the win as a “good omen” since the paper was an earlier version of a thesis chapter. (He was right!) “I was quite excited when ICLQ first accepted the article in 2009,” he recalls, “as it is among the most-cited international law journals in the world.” 

A case study in international commercial arbitrators’ decision-making, his paper focuses on a narrow question in contract law: whether a contractual party facing a breach by the other party has the right to suspend its performance temporarily, without terminating the contract, in order to place pressure on the breaching party to honour its obligations. “Every developed legal system has some rule that deals with this question,” he says, “but these rules differ fundamentally between common law and civil law jurisdictions.”

By comparing the relevant doctrines in a sample of common law and civil law countries and in various international contract law instruments, Karton analyzes the available international arbitral decisions to see which version of suspension of performance doctrine international arbitrators tend to prefer.

Karton project selected by Law Faculty for 2011 BLG Research Fellowship

For his leading-edge project "Canadian Courts in the Global Jurisconsultorium," Karton also received the $12,000 award from Borden Ladner Gervais LLP earlier this year. Samantha Wynne, Law ’13, the selected BLG Research Fellow, will work with him this summer examining the role of Canadian courts in interpreting international legal instruments.