Speaker details

Biography

James Castello is an Independent Arbitrator at Arbitration Chambers, which has offices in London and New York, as well as in Hong Kong & Singapore. James is himself based in Paris and Washington, D.C. Following 37 years of practice, the last 15 years of which were spent as a founding partner of King & Spalding’s Paris office, James retired in late 2024 from work as arbitration counsel to serve full-time as arbitrator. During his many years of practice, James particularly focused on oil and gas disputes (both up- and down-stream) as well as on large infrastructure and construction projects. James is currently deputy chair of the LCIA’s Board of Directors, having previously served on the LCIA Court (where he helped draft the 2014 Arbitration Rules). For more than two decades, James has also been a U.S. delegate to UNCITRAL’s Arbitration Working Group II (commercial arbitration) and, since 2017, to Working Group III (ISDS reform). He has spoken and written extensively on arbitration topics, authoring Commentaries on the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules that have been published by Oxford and Kluwer. He also sits on the International Advisory Board of Vienna’s International Arbitral Centre, serves as a vice-chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration (and as a founding member of its Rule of Law Task Force), and is the Co-Chair of CILS’ biennial Salzburg International Arbitration Symposium. After obtaining degrees from Yale and Berkeley, James began his legal career with clerkships at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court, and at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague. (Beginning in early 1995, James took six years off from private practice to serve in senior legal positions in the Clinton Administration, including as Deputy Counsel to the President (at the White House) and Associate Deputy Attorney General (at the Justice Department), where his portfolio included immigration, human rights, and hate crimes. Today, James is included among Lexology Index’s “Arbitration Thought Leaders 2025” and has been repeatedly listed in Legal 500 and Chambers Global, which has written that “James Castello is highly praised by clients for his ‘extensive, in-depth experience’ in international arbitration” (2016) and has quoted from clients including one (2023) who said that “James is a brilliant lawyer and a superb legal adviser.”