How Fordham Law School Prepares the Next Generation of Arbitration Lawyers with Jus Mundi

In conversation with Grant Hanessian, Adjunct Professor and Arbitrator at Fordham Law School

“If I had to describe the value of Jus Mundi in one sentence, I would say it’s unparalleled access to comprehensive primary international arbitration materials.”

Grant Hanessian,
Adjunct Professor and Arbitrator, Fordham Law School

Results at a Glance

Metric	Result
Primary materials available	Over 120,000 cases on Jus Mundi
Before Jus Mundi	Limited to templates and a small pool of anonymized awards and court decisions
Student access to real work product	Hundreds of procedural orders, including Procedural Order No. 1, available for direct study
Jurisdictional reach	Students from civil law countries worldwide access materials from their own regions
Secondary sources	Juris library, Oxford University Press publications, and leading arbitration journals integrated in one platform

Inroduction

Grant Hanessian is an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School and a practicing arbitrator with experience across international commercial cases, international treaty cases, and complex domestic matters, an adjunct professor and practicing arbitrator with experience across international commercial cases, international treaty cases, and complex domestic matters. He has taught at Fordham for eight years, delivering both a doctrinal course in international commercial arbitration and the LLM International Arbitration Practicum.

The Practicum is a practical, role-based course in which students from around the world — predominantly from civil law jurisdictions — work through the full arc of an international arbitration, drafting procedural orders, arbitrator challenges, requests for interim relief, and emergency relief applications.

Fordham adopted Jus Mundi in 2019, from the moment it became available, recognizing it as a resource that brought a new depth and breadth of primary and secondary arbitration materials to practitioners and educators.

The Opportunity

Operational Challenge

Before Jus Mundi, teaching materials for international arbitration were largely limited to court decisions and a small number of anonymized awards. As Professor Grant describes it, relying on court decisions is ” the wrong end of the telescope to try to understand how arbitration actually works in practice.” Templates could be shared with students, but templates alone are a poor substitute for exposure to the real work product of the profession.

Strategic Challenge

Professor Grant Practicum course is designed to train students for the actual demands of international arbitration practice. Lawyers and arbitrators in practice routinely use databases such as Jus Mundi to research cases and arbitrator profiles. Failing to equip students with the same tools before they enter the profession would, in his words, represent a failure to fulfil the law school’s mission. The challenge was ensuring students graduated with genuine familiarity with the resources shaping modern arbitration practice.

The Solution

Fordham Law School integrated Jus Mundi into both its doctrinal course and the LLM International Arbitration Practicum from 2019 onward. The platform gave students direct access to primary materials — the awards, procedural orders, and arbitral documents that define the actual work of international arbitration — rather than secondary accounts of it.

With over 120,000 cases available, Jus Mundi provides a depth and breadth of primary materials unavailable elsewhere. The platform also integrates the Juris library, Oxford University Press publications, and leading arbitration journals, combining case law and academic commentary in a single research environment.

The Impact

Access to Real Arbitration Work Product

The Practicum requires students to draft documents they will be expected to produce as practitioners: procedural orders, arbitrator challenges, interim relief requests. Jus Mundi makes this possible by giving students access to hundreds of real examples — including Procedural Order No. 1 — allowing them to study how arbitrators from different jurisdictions approach the same task.

As Grant notes, this gives students “quite a broad exposure to the real actual work product of international arbitration, which they’ll be called upon to do in their own practice.”

A Global Perspective for a Global Student Body

The Practicum attracts students from across the world, with a strong representation from civil law countries. Jus Mundi allows those students to search materials from their own jurisdiction or region, enabling direct comparison of how arbitration practice differs across legal traditions. This cross-jurisdictional perspective is central to the course’s purpose and was not achievable with the materials available prior to Jus Mundi.

“Before we had access to Jus Mundi, in the Practicum class particularly, we would hand out a couple of templates but that’s really not a substitute for students being able to look at how arbitrators from different parts of the world do these things. Our LLM practicum class has students from all over the world and being able to access the database of Jus Mundi allows them to look at arbitrator’s from their own jurisdiction or their own part of the world and compare how things are done in different places. Also, in the doctrinal course, it gives students a much richer database of cases to look at.”

A Richer Resource for Doctrinal Teaching

Beyond the Practicum, Jus Mundi enhances the doctrinal course by providing students with a substantially larger and more relevant database of cases. Rather than relying primarily on court decisions about arbitration, students can engage directly with arbitral awards — the primary outputs of the process they are studying.

“Many times, research or preparing documentation are very boring tasks,” Eduardo notes. “Now, because of the time gained thanks to Jus AI, at all levels of our team, we are having more time to undertake activities which correspond more to what a lawyer should be.”

Supporting the Arbitrator’s Own Practice

Grant also uses Jus Mundi in his capacity as a practicing arbitrator. When serving as a co-arbitrator and evaluating potential chairs, he relies on Jus Mundi to research prospective candidates: the kinds of cases they have worked on and how they approach their role. The platform provides a level of insight into arbitrator practice that was previously unavailable.

“Jus Mundi allows me, particularly when I’m oriented as a wing, a co-arbitrator, and I’m looking for chairs when I’m looking at people who I haven’t worked with. Jus Mundi is incredibly helpful to help me understand the kinds of cases prospective chairs have worked on and how they work.”

Closing Value

The case for integrating Jus Mundi into legal education is straightforward: practitioners use it, and law schools have a responsibility to prepare students for the world those practitioners inhabit. For Fordham, Jus Mundi has transformed what is possible in the classroom — replacing limited templates and indirect sources with the comprehensive, primary, jurisdictionally diverse materials that define modern international arbitration practice.

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