David Butler is Emeritus Professor in Mercantile Law at Stellenbosch University, near Cape Town, South Africa, where he taught International Commercial Arbitration for many years as part of their LLM programme. He was the author of the SA Law Reform Commission’s report Arbitration: An International Arbitration Act for South Africa in 1998. He was advisor to the Department of Justice throughout the parliamentary process leading to the commencement of the International Arbitration Act on 20 December 2017. He serves on the SALRC’s Project Committee on ADR, which is considering the desirability of legislation in South Africa to promote mediation. Among his publications, he was co-author of Arbitration in South Africa: Law and Practice (1993) and wrote the title on Arbitration for LAWSA (the local equivalent of Halsbury’s Laws of England) (3rd edition 2015). He is involved in arbitrator training for two South African arbitration institutions, including AFSA, and has also served on committees tasked with drafting arbitration rules, including the committee of CAJAC (Johannesburg) which drew up the first draft of the Standard CAJAC Arbitration Rules (2020). He also acted as a consultant to the committee which drafted the AFSA International Arbitration Rules of June 2021 and is a member of the AFSA International Court established to supervise those rules. Besides frequently participating at arbitration conferences in South Africa, since 1994 he has been a regular speaker at conferences on arbitration and ADR elsewhere in Africa and has represented AFSA on two visits to China in 2018 and 2019, on the second occasion as a speaker at the China Law Society Conference held in November 2019 in Guangzhou on the Belt and Road Initiative. His particular research interest is on the development of arbitration law and practice in African jurisdictions.