Building Trust for Trade and Investment: Regulatory Adjudication and the Legitimacy Bargain of the Qatar International Court
This paper advances a single analytical claim and tests it against the published regulatory jurisprudence of the Qatar International Court and Dispute Resolution Centre (QICDRC). The claim is that adjudicative hubs of the QICDRC type do not compete with international arbitration on the plane of legal doctrine; they compete on the plane of institutional credibility. What such a hub sells is not a superior theory of contract or of administrative review but a particular kind of public good—reasoned, published, appealable adjudication of the regulatory questions that determine whether capital is safe in a jurisdiction. I describe the resulting equilibrium as a legitimacy bargain: the hub offers an internationally legible court process across anti-money-laundering enforcement, prudential discipline, tax, and employment, and in exchange market actors accept the displacement of those disputes from confidential arbitration into open regulatory adjudication. The argument proceeds through four case groups—the Horizon Crescent litigation, the senior-manager accountability decisions, a tax-deduction appeal, and an employment-standards dispute—read doctrinally along four axes: standard of review, remedy and sanction, procedural fairness, and the clarity of compliance guidance generated by the reasons. The paper concludes that the hub reduces transaction costs precisely where arbitration is structurally incapable of doing so, but that this advantage is contingent on disciplined coordination with the arbitral order rather than competition with it.
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