Professional practice
Tariq Baloch’s practice encompasses international arbitration (international investment treaty claims and international commercial arbitration), public international law and commercial litigation. He is highly sought after for international arbitration and arbitration related court cases, and on three occasions has been recognised by his peers and the major directories as the International Arbitration junior of the year (2019, 2022 and 2024). He is regularly instructed by parties and states as a lead advocate to conduct advocacy in high stakes cases most recently in a series of cases in the English Courts for the Kingdom of Spain and in multi-billion dollar arbitrations. His most recent victory was in the Court of Appeal (before Vos (MR), Flaux (Chancellor) and Snowden LJ) where as lead advocate he successfully defended an application to make Spain’s appeal conditional on paying into court c 120 million euros [2024] EWCA Civ 52.
In commercial arbitration, he has represented or advised private parties under all the major arbitral rules in a wide range of sectors. His experience includes acting for some of the world’s largest companies in high value complex arbitrations involving disputes around the world. His cases are often multi-jurisdictional and raise complex procedural and substantive private law questions, calling upon his expertise in the fields of restitution, contract and remedies (having taught the subjects and written a leading text on them). He is often instructed on technical cases to conduct the cross examination of the experts, including on quantum.
In the past few years he has been involved in some of the more important precedent setting investor-state cases concerning issues such as the impact of the landmark Achmea judgment on the validity of investment treaties, the power of tribunals to issues interim measures preventing a state from pursuing criminal procedures, prosecution of pure customary international law claims under an investment treaty, the scope of reflective loss claims and state succession issues. He is also one of the handful of counsel who is equally in demand by investors and states and so has real insight into how both sides typically conduct their investor state cases.
He regularly represents parties in challenge, recognition and enforcement proceedings in the English courts. Most recently he represented the Kingdom of Spain as lead advocate in the Court of Appeal in one of the Lawyer magazine’s Top 10 appeals for 2024, appealing a judgment [2023] EWHC 1226 that has been described as “one of the most significant judgments on state immunity and international arbitration in decades”, as it provides “guidance […] on many issues of the interaction between UK primary legislation, international customary law [sic], the ICSID Convention and EU law”. Other significant cases in recent years include Operafund v Spain [2024] EWHC 82 (first case raising question of partial enforcement of an ICSID award), NIOC v Crescent [2023] EWCA 826 (a rare and probably first summary dismissal of s 67 challenge; and now the lead judgment on s 73 and on the scope of s67(4) of the Arbitration Act 1996); Crescent v NIOC [2024] EWHC 835 (successful invocation of s 423 of the Insolvency Act to retransfer a major asset in London; now on appeal on a novel question of trust law) and Infrastructure v Spain [2024] EWCA Civ 52 (lead judgment on applications to the Court of Appeal for conditions to be attached to the appeal). He is also instructed in another enforcement action against a large Asian state which raises novel issues about the operation of issue estoppel in claims against states.
Prior to entering practice, he was a full time academic and had been a lecturer and tutor at the University of Oxford and assistant professor at the London School of Economics. He regularly writes and speaks on international arbitration, international law, and law of obligations including at the Harvard Law School and the British Institute for International and Comparative Law. His book Unjust Enrichment and Contract (Hart, Oxford, 2009) is cited in leading English texts, including Chitty on Contracts and Goff and Jones: The law of Unjust Enrichment, and was described by the professor of English law at Oxford as the “definitive” work in the area. He is the author of the inaugural chapter on arbitration in Phipson on Evidence (20th ed, 2021), one of the leading English texts on the law of evidence. He was educated at Queen Mary, University of London (Herchel Smith Scholar), Harvard Law School (Kennedy Scholar) and the University of Oxford (Graduate Scholar), where he obtained his DPhil (PhD). He is also a proud trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust.