Speaker details

Biography

James Castello is a founding partner of King & Spalding’s Paris office, specializing in international commercial and investor-State arbitration. Based in Europe for 23 of his 36 years in practice, James now serves as both counsel and arbitrator. In the past two decades, James’ practice has focused on energy disputes and large infrastructure cases. James and a K&S team recently won a $2+ billion award against Egypt for having curtailed long-term gas supply. During the past 22 years, James has served as a U.S. delegate to UNCITRAL’s Arbitration Working Groups, participating actively in drafting or revising every arbitration and mediation instrument then adopted by the UN. He has written Commentaries on UNCITRAL's Arbitration Rules and Transparency Rules for books published by Oxford, Kluwer, and Juris. James has also been a member of the LCIA Court, where he helped draft the LCIA’s 2014 Arbitration Rules, and is now Deputy Chair of the LCIA’s Board of Directors. James sits on the International Advisory Board of Vienna’s International Arbitral Centre, is a Vice-Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, and co-chairs CILS' biennial Salzburg Arbitration Symposium. Beginning in 1995, James served for six years in senior legal positions in the Clinton Administration, including as Deputy Counsel to the President at the White House and Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Justice Department, where his portfolio included immigration, hate crimes, and human rights. James earlier served as law clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., and at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague. He holds degrees from Yale University (B.A.) and the University of California, Berkeley (J.D. & M.A. (Economics)) and is admitted to the bar in New York, Washington D.C., and Paris.