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Chip Brower Appointed ITA Vice Chair
Miller Canfield attorney Chip Brower has been appointed Senior Vice Chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration (ITA), the most significant professional organization for international arbitration in the Americas, and one of the most significant in the world. In June 2024, Brower will become the 12th Chair of the ITA. He succeeds a line of exceptionally prominent practitioners and academics who have led the 3,500-member organization since its inception in 1986.
Brower is a professor of law at Wayne State University and of counsel to the International Disputes Group at Miller Canfield in Detroit. Before moving to Michigan in 2012, he was a professor at the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi for 14 years. He has been a member of the ITA’s Executive Committee for many years, serving as Vice Chair of the Institute, Chair of the Academic Council, and Chair or Co-Chair of several committees and task forces.
Brower has served as arbitrator, counsel, or advocate in proceedings conducted under the AAA Commercial Rules, the AAA International Rules, the HKIAC Rules, the ICC Rules, and the SIAC Rules, as well as in advisory proceedings before the International Court of Justice. He has also served as an expert witness on the U.S. law of international arbitration and litigation for high-value proceedings in Canadian courts. His scholarship on international commercial and investment treaty arbitration has been cited and quoted by federal courts in Canada and the United States, most recently by the Eleventh Circuit’s unanimous en banc opinion in Corporación AIC, SA v. Hidroeléctrica Santa Rita SA.
Brower is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has been listed in Who’s Who Legal: Arbitration since 2014. In the past, he has served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, as a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University’s Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, as Visiting Professor and Scholar-in-Residence at American University’s Washington College of Law, and a member of the AAA’s Observer Delegation to UNCITRAL Working Group II.
Brower received the Smit-Lowenfeld Prize for the best article on international arbitration in 2012, and the Donald H. Gordon Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2017.
Bower graduated from the University of Vermont with a B.A. in Political Science and Russian Language and from the University of Virginia with a J.D.