“Reaching for the Stars” – 27 March 2026

On 27 March 2026, Anthony Lo Surdo SC attended the Australian Dispute Centre’s Annual Conference themed “Reaching for the Stars: Exploring the Frontiers of Dispute Resolution.”

He had the great pleasure of leading a team from the NSW Bar Association in the “Great Intestellar Debate” for the affirmative on the motion “this house believes that ADR is the only viable method for resolving disputes in outer space.”

A wonderful day and so much fun to compete with my NSW Bar Association colleagues Penny Thew FCIArb GAICD and Matthias Thompson.

The affirmative rested with a poem I penned for the occasion with more than a few allusions to popular science fiction and which summed up the four pillars of our case (the legal void, the jurisdictional void, the technical imperative and the ineffectiveness of state-based domestic legal systems and speed, flexibility and finality):

“Let us look to the night and choose how we settle our claims and our might.

For the law of the land cannot breathe in the black, and there’s no turning back once we follow the track.

Beyond the blue marble, the ‘Twilight Zone’ waits, where gravity fails and the Earth law abates. If we bring our old courts to the stars and the dust, our systems will wither and crumble to rust.

Imagine the good ship ‘Enterprise’, stalled in its flight, waiting for judges to rule on its right?

Or the ‘Jupiter 2’, lost and drifting in space, while a gavel on Earth moves at snail-like a pace? No, ‘Lost in Space’ isn’t just fiction, you see, if we bind our explorers to a terrestrial decree.

We need the ‘Negotiator’—the ‘Jedi’s’ old art, to settle the friction before it can start.

For an adversarial clash, as the Sith would prefer, is a ‘Space Odyssey’ disaster that’s bound to occur. If ‘HAL’ or the crew had a mediator’s hand, the pod bay doors open as originally planned.

The ‘Final Frontier’ demands we be wise, to resolve or bind every party before conflict can rise. Not with subpoenas or long-winded pleas, but with Arbitration—and technical ease.

For in vacuum and void, where the silence is deep, it’s ADR that the galaxy shall keep.”