WATCH: Brigitte Stern shares path to becoming an arbitrator at GAR Awards

GAR’s lifetime achievement award winner Brigitte Stern looked back on her life and career, and shared insights into how she made the transition from university professor to leading investor-state arbitrator, at the GAR Awards.

In a 20-minute film screened at the awards ceremony in Paris, Stern – who is only the second woman to win the award – adapted a quotation by French author Simone de Beauvoir, “On ne naît pas femme : on le devient [One is not born a woman: one becomes one].“

”On ne naît pas arbitre: on le devient [One is not born an arbitrator: one becomes one],” she said.

Stern, who was filmed in her apartment in Paris in front of a bookcase of files and a framed picture featuring her grandchildren’s handprints, explained that her career as an arbitrator was a “second career” after many years as a public international law professor at a succession of French universities. 

As guests at the GAR Awards learned from the many tributes paid to her, she is also an accomplished artist and photographer, with a studio in Paris and a huge portfolio of works.

Stern shared photos from her family album, including photos of her at about one year old (“I think I already look like I’m very interested in the world”) and at 10 years old, at the top of a climbing frame (“I always wanted to go as far as possible. Where there was a lake, I wanted to go round the lake, and I always wanted to climb as high as possible).

She also shared photos of her marriage to mathematician Jacques Stern and her 50th wedding anniversary, “with the same husband and the same gown.”

“Needless to say, the father of our two sons is the miracle of my life,” she declared.

A later photo showed Stern in a red robe becoming a French university professor after the publication of her 1975 thesis, Le Préjudice dans la théorie de la responsabilité internationale. She went on to teach for 40 years “with immense pleasure” at Dijon University, Paris X Nanterre and at the Sorbonne. 

“I absolutely loved to teach and always induced my students to understand the problems they are facing,” Stern said. A video clip of one of her grandchildren as a baby, turning one way and then the other as he strived to make sense of a beam of sunlight on a polished floor, illustrated the lesson she tried to convey.

“When you are faced with an unusual problem, you look on one side and then you look on the other side until you understand,” she explained. “And it’s the same with arbitration: if you have two parties before you, you have to look first at what one party says and then what the other party says to understand the case.”

Stern said she became a “young arbitrator” in 2000. (Her first ICSID case, to which she was appointed that year, was Ridgepointe v Republic of Congo).

“It takes a long time to become an organised arbitrator,” Stern continued. She shared images of the “artisinale” arrangement of her files, in haphazardly stacked cardboard trays, at the start of her arbitrator career, and her rigorously organised bookshelves now, with labelled coloured files for her work on different cases. 

“Arbitration is hard work and a demanding passion but you have also some joyful moments,” Stern said.

She showed two emails from tribunal presidents she had sat with, including one from the late Johnny Veeder, who she said was “a wonderful president”, in which he humorously expressed his bemusement at a particularly complex exchange of submissions by the parties.

Another, from an unidentified tribunal president, showed how hard it can be to “finalise” an award. The president wrote: “Yes of course I will make the changes whether I agree or not that they are necessary – at this stage I would agree to incorporate the Manhattan telephone directory if it would help move this appallingly late award to finalisation!”

Stern also described an exchange in one case she sat on, in which a party brought up an image of a fish in a PowerPoint presentation to signal that their opponent’s argument was a “red herring”.

“But then what happened? The other party said it’s red, but it’s not a herring, and for 10 minutes we had exchanges, replies, rejoinders on what kind of fish it was.”

Stern went on to note how “exhausting” arbitration hearings can be even if interesting, leaving tribunals, after weeks of witness evidence and submissions, “completely dried up”. 

Turning to post-hearings, she noted the rules of confidentiality that apply and the need to destroy files after a certain time. She showed a photograph of a file that she had shredded and then, to avoid waste, transformed into a large spherical sculpture, one of many work of art inspired by her career as an arbitrator. 

Stern’s film appearance drew to a close with a tribute to her sons and five grandchildren (four boys and “only one little girl, my princess”). She went on to show a photo of the family taken when her husband received the CNRS Gold Medal, the highest scientific research award in France, for his work in the field of cryptology, “which, as you all know, is the science of secrets.”

She ended by expressing her gratitude for the GAR Lifetime Achievement Award but saying that she hoped she still had more to achieve. She displayed a photograph she had taken, while walking the streets of Paris, of some profound words of graffiti: “Tout achever sauf le désir  [To complete everything except desire]”.

After being presented with her award by GAR’s publisher David Samuels and chief correspondent and editor-at-large Alison Ross, Stern spoke again from the stage.

Stern noted the continuing success of Paris Arbitration Week, commenting that it is now “a world event… like the Olympic Games and… more flashy than Fashion Week, which is evident when I look at the elegant company at this GAR gala dinner.”

“I only regret that, being in and out of an arbitration hearing all week, I could not attend any event except this one,” she said.

Stern said the compliments she had received during the ceremony were “quite exaggerated, though I enjoyed them all”. She quoted another French literary figure, novelist and dramatist Francois Mauriac, who said “There is no love, no friendship that has crossed our destiny without having participated in it for eternity.”

Stern went on to name some of those who had contributed to her success, starting with her late parents, “who gave me self confidence.”

“They were both lawyers. My mother Alice was the first woman at the Strasbourg bar; my father Louis wrote a thesis, in 1936, entitled ‘Le droit de la radiodiffusion“ [the law of radio broadcasting], a hot topic at the time,” she revealed.

She said she owed gratitude, also, to the late French professor Paul Reuter, one of the 20th century’s leading specialists on international law and the architect of the legal framework of what became the European Union, and to the late international arbitrator and professor Prosper Weil.

She said Reuter had been her thesis adviser and warned her against writing it on space law, as she had originally wanted, as he said that, on this topic, it was “too late to make poetry and too early to make law”.

Weil had given her her “first exposure to dispute resolution” when she assisted him with pleadings before the International Court of Justice in the Barcelona Traction case. (She later appeared before the ICJ in the case between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro over the application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as counsel to Bosnia and Herzegovina).

Stern went on to thank GAR, the many colleagues who had paid tribute to her in the film; and Sabrina Robert-Cuendet, her former assistant.

Now a professor, Robert-Cuendet is currently finalising an edition of Stern’s collected works entitled L’État dans tout ses ‘états [“The state in all its states”] to be published by Editions Pedone in Paris.

“I urge you to watch out for the publication of what will certainly be a bestseller!” Stern said.

Lastly, she expressed “immense gratitude” to her husband and sons, Julien and Alexandre Stern, “for just being you”.

Stern, who received lengthy standing ovations both before and after the award presentation, was accompanied to the ceremony, held at Hotel du Collectionneur in Paris on 10 April, by her husband and sons.

The film was produced by Alison Ross and videographer and photographer Guillaume Lassus-Dessus and edited by Imogen Hughes-Tait.

Stern was interviewed by GAR at the ICCA Congress in Rio in 2010.