A new federal district court decision from Dallas embraces the position of the U.S. Second and Third Circuit Courts of Appeals that the U.S. Federal Arbitration Act (”FAA”) does not permit non-party subpoenas for pre-hearing document discovery, but only permits such subpoenas if they require the non-party to appear at an arbitration hearing and to [...]
In a practical demonstration of how rigorous are the standards under New York law for compelling a non-signatory to arbitrate under the “estoppel” and “alter ego” doctrines, the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan has issued a decision denying a motion to compel Deutsche Bank AG (”DB”) to arbitrate before a FINRA [...]
A judge in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan has vacated a reinsurance arbitration award on grounds of evident partiality of the presiding arbitrator and one party-appointed co-arbitrator. The award was signed by these two arbitrators, with the third arbitrator registering dissent. During the course of the proceedings, the two arbitrators who ultimately signed the [...]
Adhering to well-settled principles concerning the separability of the arbitration clause, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an order that had denied a motion to compel arbitration, and held that the lower court improperly relied upon allegations of fraud in the inducement of the entire contract and that there were no sufficient allegations [...]
Readers of these Commentaries will have been exposed recently to Second Circuit decision in January 2010 concerning the powers of an international arbitrator to reconsider and change the outcome under the rubric of correcting “clerical” and “typographical” errors. (T. Co. Metals LLC v. Dempsey Pipe & Supply, Inc., 2010 U.S. App. LEXIS 893 [...]
A recent judgment of the Hong Kong Court of Appeal addresses in painstaking detail the sovereign immunity issues implicated when enforcement and execution are sought of a private arbitration award which, while made in the territory of a Member State of the New York Convention, runs against a sovereign state that is not itself a [...]
Five-time Olympic champion German speed skater Claudia Pechstein today awaits a decision from an arbitral tribunal of the ad hoc Division of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (”CAS”), hoping for a reprieve from a two-year suspension imposed a year ago when blood tests indicated use of performance enhancing drugs.
Respondents in the case [...]
A federal district judge in Indiana last week commendably resisted the temptation to impose a permanent stay of an ICDR arbitration that arguably was brought to reopen and relitigate issues decided in an earlier award that had been confirmed by the District Court and uphed by the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Citing a [...]
When a U.S. District Court Judge vacates an arbitration award on grounds of “evident partiality,” it is an occasion for the arbitration community to take a careful look, to see if the arbitrator’s conduct was clearly improper, or if instead there has been an overzealous judicial intrusion. Therefore, I consider here a [...]
On the eve of the 52d Session of the UNCITRAL Working Group II (Arbitration and Conciliation), which convenes at the United Nations in New York on February 1 for a five-day deliberation, arbitration practitioners in the United States have just been reminded, by a decision of the influential Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, that [...]