Stephen Fietta KC

Practice Areas

Stephen Fietta KC is the firm’s founder. He is ranked by Chambers Global Directory as one of the world’s top public international law practitioners. He regularly advises sovereign clients on high profile and/or sensitive matters of public international law. He is included in The Legal 500 Hall of Fame as an individual who is “at the pinnacle of the profession” in Public International Law.

He has practised at the forefront of public international law, whether within government or private practice, for more than 20 years. He has advised on cases before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), European Court of Justice, European Court of Human Rights and multiple domestic courts. He also prolific and longstanding practice in investment arbitration, having appeared in more than 30 pending and decided cases under the World Bank (ICSID), UNCITRAL and other rules. He has won some of the largest or most notable investment arbitration awards.

Before establishing Fietta in 2015, Stephen co-founded the world’s first specialist public international law firm (Volterra Fietta) in 2011. Prior to that, he was a partner specialising in public international law at a leading US and global law firm. Both of those practices were top-ranked at the time. Stephen regularly manages large teams of lawyers (including co-counsel), experts and witnesses in multiple jurisdictions.

Publications

Stephen has published widely on various PIL and international arbitration topics. He co-authored (with Dr Robin Cleverly) A Practitioner’s Guide to Maritime Boundary Delimitation (OUP, published March 2016), which has subsequently been cited before both the ICJ and ITLOS, and has published extensively on international investment law, including an award-winning article (co-authored by Dr James Upcher) on the interplay between international commercial arbitration and PIL.