Last year Chevron, as judgment debtor for a $17.2 billion environmental damages judgment issued by an Ecuador court, convinced a US district judge in New York to issue a global anti-enforcement injunction preventing the Ecuadorean parties from seeking enforcement of that judgment anywhere.  Late last year the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued an [...]

Faithful readers of Arbitration Commentaries will be familiar with several principles that are repeated in the cases discussed in this space.   One, mentioned in last week’s post concerning the DC Circuit’s vacatur of a investment arbitration award, is that US courts generally find “clear and unmistakable evidence” of an agreement to arbitrate “arbitrability” issues when the [...]

In a commentary appearing in this space a few months ago, after the Ontario Court of Appeal’s decision in Government of Mexico v. Cargill, I suggested that American courts might decide the scope of judicial review of an investment treaty tribunal’s determination of its own jurisdiction by concluding that the parties’ agreement to resolve disputes [...]

The US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC holds that the New York Convention supplies the exclusive grounds for a federal district court to adjourn an award confirmation proceeding, and that such grounds do not include a pending proceeding to nullify the award against a foreign State, in its courts, when that State was not [...]

Under US arbitration law the question of whether multiple arbitration claims may proceed on a consolidated (or class) basis may well be a question for determination by the arbitral tribunal in the first instance. A recent decision from the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, refusing to rule on the consolidation issue, and thus leaving [...]

The point of departure for today’s discussion is a pair of decisions by a respected federal district judge in New York, one granting a motion to disqualify counsel in a pending arbitration and the other denying reconsideration of the first decision. The misconduct involved was rather troubling: in a reinsurance arbitration apparently under AAA Commercial [...]

Arbitration Commentaries wrote several months ago that the US Second Circuit’s decision in the 2002 Monegasque case (Monegasque de Reassurances S.A.M. (Monde Re) v. NAK Naftogaz of Ukraine, 311 F.3d 488 (2d Cir. 2002)) — holding that the forum non conveniens (“FNC”) doctrine of discretionary dismissal applies to New York Convention summary confirmation proceedings — [...]

Today Arbitration Commentaries writes in praise of a federal district judge in San Francisco, for rejecting a too-clever-by-half arbitration-avoidance argument: that a professed willingness to arbitrate, but only in a particular venue not specified in the contract, is not a “refusal” or “failure” to arbitrate under the Federal Arbitration Act. (Beauperthuy v. 24 Hour Fitness [...]

The question of what law is to be applied to determine the existence, validity, or scope of a purported agreement to arbitrate between parties from different nations (and subsidiarily, how the answer might depend on whether the question is presented to a court or an arbitral tribunal) has long attracted considerable attention in the scholarly [...]

As arbitrators we think quite a lot about “functus officio,” this being a quaint latin expression for our status on the morning after delivery of a final award. But we do not often enough think about or discuss where this disempowered status fits within the scheme of arbitration law — a question to which the [...]

Arbitration Commentaries has written on more than one occasion on the question, not consistently decided in the US courts, of whether the Federal Arbitration Act (”FAA”) provides authority for a federal court to enjoin a pending arbitration. In a significant recent decision, the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a District Court’s order enjoining [...]

Today’s topic is the power of the international arbitrator, or lack of it, to issue an anti-suit/anti-arbitration injunction in a final award.  Assume the parties have a commercial contract, and that an arbitrable dispute has arisen over whether Party A may as a remedy for a default foreclose upon common shares owned by Party B. Party [...]

Numerous federal district courts and a handful of federal courts of appeals have played a part in the ongoing investment treaty arbitration between Chevron Corporation and the Republic of Ecuador. They have entertained and for the most part have granted discovery applications addressed to non-parties residing in the United States, made pursuant to 28 U.S.C. [...]