The future trends of international arbitration remain uncertain due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its continued impact on all aspects of global trade. Professor Luke Nottage, a long-term scholar of international commercial and investor-state arbitration, hopes that the pandemic will push trends in international arbitration towards greater informalization and globalization, positions for which he has long advocated.

Professor Nottage's belief that international arbitration should be informal and global echoes throughout International Commercial and Investor-State Arbitration: Australia and Japan in Regional and Global Contexts, which is a collection of previously-published articles and studies Professor Nottage has prepared over the past twenty years. His particular focus is on how Australia and Japan have approached the two subjects. Professor Nottage updates his older studies and includes a final chapter discussing how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted international arbitration.

Professor Nottage organizes his studies roughly in chronological order and divides the book into three parts, following an initial chapter introducing the book's main themes and organization. The first part discusses international commercial arbitration, diving first into an overview of international commercial arbitration and its broad themes and trends since the 1970s (Chapters 2 and 3). Professor Nottage then turns his attention to the individual policies and practices of international commercial arbitration within Japan (Chapter 4) and Australia (Chapter 5). Although both states modelled their domestic arbitration laws on the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, the two developed different approaches. Japan has become increasingly formal in its application of international commercial arbitration and created a localized globalism of international commercial arbitration. Australia hasn't become the global (or even regional) center of international commercial arbitration that it hoped when it passed its arbitration law in 2010, largely becoming more formalized and inefficient (something Professor Nottage attributes to its common law approach to arbitration) (p. 175).

The second part of the book shifts tone substantially, discussing the crossover of international commercial arbitration into investor-state arbitration. This section first dives into Professor Nottage's criticism of international commercial arbitration, as he blames increasing delays, costs, and formalization within international commercial arbitration on international law firms needing to charge large billables for arbitrations, on the information asymmetry inherent to arbitration due to its high levels of confidentiality, and various reasons why alternatives to cross-border disputes (such as arbitration-mediation hybrids) haven't been embraced (Chapter 6). He then shifts to a discussion of investor-state arbitration; his criticisms are less sharp, albeit similarly placing much of the blame for the problems in investor-state arbitration on the large Western law firms, arguing that they are bringing the same practices used in international commercial arbitration into investor-state arbitration. He ultimately ends on a somewhat positive note, arguing that the positive aspects of investor-state arbitration may feed back into international commercial arbitration, resulting in increased informalization and decreased costs and delays.

The following chapter (Chapter 7) focuses on the history of international arbitration, and the trends in international commercial arbitration and investor-state arbitration. He particularly praises investor-state arbitration for its increased transparency, at least compared to international commercial arbitration. This leads nicely into his next chapter (Chapter 8), which discusses the confidentiality and transparency issues in international commercial arbitration and investor-state arbitration in Japan and Australia. Professor Nottage's main point here focuses on the increased confidentiality of international commercial arbitration (necessary, but which creates information asymmetries) as compared with the transparency of investor-state arbitration (necessary because of state involvement, which requires more disclosures). He essentially argues that the transparency in investor-state arbitration would be beneficial to international commercial arbitration, using Japan and Australia's experiences to support his argument. He acknowledges that both the Japanese and Australian governments are likely to take a wait-and-see approach before making any substantial changes to their current systems of international arbitration.

Last, Part III shifts the focus entirely to investor-state arbitration and international investment treaties. This section focuses heavily on Australia, with one chapter focusing on the Australian government's 2011–2013 policy decision to move away from allowing investor-state dispute settlement agreements in its international treaties (Chapter 9). After analyzing the government's policy (which Professor Nottingham clearly disagreed with), he makes suggestions for possible reforms to the policy and different groups that could benefit from it, finishing with a note that a change in government resulted in a change in policy. Chapter 11 turns to Australia's investor-state arbitration practices since 2013, tracing the government's policies and responses to various arbitration claims, opposition to the investor-state arbitration within certain factions of the government, and Professor Nottage's attempts to convince the Australian government of his position on investor-state arbitration. Chapter 10 also remains broadly on Australia, but with a discussion of the Japan-Australia Free Trade Agreement and the decision not to include an investor-state dispute settlement clause within that treaty. While Professor Nottage praises the lack of a dispute settlement agreement because it made the parties more flexible, he notes the limited influence of the decision within the Asian region since Japan continued to insist on including such provisions in treaties it made with other Asian countries. In particular, Japan has taken a “cautious, flexible, and low-key” approach, especially when compared to Australia (p. 306).

Professor Nottage echoes several arguments throughout the book, primarily that countries should take a more global and informal approach to international arbitration (which he sees as reducing the costs and delays of international arbitration); and he regularly rails against the rise of large international law firms in Asia (which he sees as increasing the formalization and costs of international arbitration). The book, designed as a compilation of various articles and studies that Professor Nottage has done, means that a single chapter may be picked up and read without reference to the other chapters. Professor Nottage does a fairly thorough job of including cross-references to other chapters for those readers who may wish to read another, relevant chapter. This pleasant aspect of the book is somewhat countered by age of the earlier chapters and the lack of clarity around what and to what extent the information in the chapter had been updated since its original publication (some of which are over 15 years old). Additionally, the chapters and their themes can be repetitive at times, seeing as they were each originally published individually rather than as a coherent whole.

Overall, the book would be useful for readers interested in the history of international commercial arbitration or investor-state arbitration; or for those especially interested in how each of these have played out within either Australia or Japan. Libraries with collections in either of these areas would benefit from this book, especially if they are able to point readers to specific chapters of interest.