Featured in our documentaryZones of Progress One of the voices in our film on the past, present and future of Special Economic Zones. Prof Mark Beer OBE is Chairman of The Metis Institute and a visiting fellow and co-founder of the Deep Tech Dispute Resolution Lab at the University of Oxford. He served as Chief Executive Officer of the DIFC’s Dispute Resolution Authority, Registrar General of the DIFC Courts and Registrar to the Dubai World Tribunal, and is a past President of the International Association for Court Administration and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Expert Network.
He was behind the creation of the DIFC’s Dispute Resolution Authority and is widely credited with the DIFC Courts’ success: a common-law commercial court inside a civil-law country, working in English, with judgments enforceable abroad, which is the single piece of institutional design most new zones now try to copy.
At the Metis Institute he advises governments and zones on doing it deliberately, and his measure is public trust rather than throughput. A court is only useful to a new jurisdiction if the people expected to invest under it believe it will rule against its own government when the law requires that.