Treaty Developments - Negotiations

Chile follows a civil law system strongly influenced by the Spanish and French legal systems, specifically by the Napo¬leonic Code model.

On October 7, 2025, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case that tests the extent of First Amendment protections for regulated professionals.

A Chilean appellate court annulled a major international arbitration award in a salmon-farming acquisition dispute, ruling that the tribunal exceeded its mandate by recharacterizing the buyers' contractual damages claim into an unpleaded restitutionary price adjustment claim. The decision explores the boundaries of the iura novit curia principle and its limits when tribunals reshape claims beyond what parties actually submitted for arbitration.

Nineteen years after the dispute began, a second ICSID tribunal has refused to grant monetary compensation to Spanish publisher Victor Pey Casado, now aged 101, for the loss of his publishing business under the Pinochet regime – with the arbitrators expressing their hope that the case will now be at a "final end".

El procedimiento de E-Discovery, esto es, la posibilidad de solicitar documentos y/u otra evidencia a través de un procedimiento normado en forma previa al juicio, no es ajeno a nuestra legislación...

International commercial arbitration in Chile is governed by a modern statutory framework based on the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration (1985), as enacted through Law No. 19,971...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchmen?) – A question that goes all the way back to Platon and made famous by Roman poet Juvenal.

On August 11, 2023, the Arbitration and Mediation Center of the Santiago Chamber of Commerce (CAM Santiago) introduced new rules on emergency arbitration (EA) to its domestic Arbitration Rules...