It is said that ‘not many fields of law use comparative law as extensively as international arbitration’ (Vadi, 2010). Indeed, comparative approaches to international arbitration law have assumed greater importance in the study of both commercial and investment arbitration. This chapter explores the applications of comparative law methods in the developments of international arbitration law, reviews their key contributions, and suggests potential directions for future study. These methods, whether traditional, historical, linguistic, socio-legal, empirical, or economic have all been employed to varying degrees and varying effects in the study of international arbitration law. Drawing from key publications in the field, this chapter will explore the research focus, themes of enquiry, organisational structures, and analytical techniques of each method in turn as applied to comparative arbitration studies.

This chapter follows the definition of ‘empirical legal studies’ as research which applies quantitative methods to questions about the relationship between law and society, in particular with the aim of drawing conclusions about causal connections between variables. Comparative law does not typically phrase its research as being interested in questions of causal inference. Yet, implicitly, it is very much interested in such topics as it explores, for example, the determinants of legal differences between countries or when it evaluates how far it may be said that one of the legal solutions is preferable. It is thus valuable that significant progress has been made in empirical approaches to comparative law that may be able to show robust causal links about the relationship between law and society. This chapter outlines the main types of such studies: experiments, cross-sectional studies, panel data analysis and quasi-experiments. However, it also shows that such studies face a number of methodological problems. This chapter concludes that often it may be most promising to combine different methods in order to reach a valid empirical result.

The misconception of culture is responsible for many difficulties in comparative law. This chapter suggests that a general concept of culture is inevitably distorting or empty, and that any meaningful talk of culture can only take place upon microscopic elements. Cultural elements are different in their relevance to the constitution of the problem of life and accordingly the problem of law; the enquiries into the cultural impacts upon law must be based upon the relevance of a particular element to a particular law. The insider’s view to apprehend culture is a fallacy; the outsider’s view is the only way possible to know a culture. Taking culture as a purely subjective construction is another common misconception while the objectivity of cultural elements is essential for the proper understanding of culture and the methodological improvement of comparative law.