Sometimes obscured in the conversation over whether Section 1782 of the U.S. Judiciary Law even applies to private international commercial arbitration is the question of whether such judicially-enabled discovery offends core values of international arbitration —  intruding upon the arbitrators’ control over the proceedings, and tilting an initially level evidence-gathering playing field in favor of the party that benefits most from evidence located in the United States.

A successful ex parte Section 1782 application before a New Jersey U.S. District Court in November 2012 provides a useful point of entry to examine this question. (In re Mesa Power Group, LLC, 2012 WL 6060941 (D.N.J. Nov. 20, 2012). See also, in the same court regarding the same arbitration but a different non-party witness, In re Mesa Power Group, LLC, 2013 WL 1890222  (D.N.J. April 19, 2013). The latter opinion is too recent to have attracted published responsive comment from the Arbitral Tribunal). The order was made in relation to a nascent NAFTA Chapter 11 arbitration between a U.S. investor and the Government of Canada — the latter defending alleged NAFTA violations by the Province of Ontario. Whereas the pleadings, submissions, and procedural orders in the NAFTA are) publicly-available (e.g., www.italaw.com), we who enjoy these sporting events as spectators when not players or referees have rather choice seats from which to consider the 1782 case in its precise arbitral procedural context.

Claimant’s business is generating electric power from wind farms, and it maintained such facilities in Ontario. One of its competitors, a Samsung company, signed a major supply contract with Ontario, and as an element of the deal was granted transmission capacity on Ontario’s power grid.  Ontario declined to buy electricity from Claimant, which then filed a Notice of Arbitration claiming inter alia breach of the duty to provide fair and equitable treatment. The damages are alleged to exceed $775 million USD.

Claimant obtained Section 1782 discovery orders from the New Jersey federal court on an ex parte basis, as Section 1782 allows. (In fairness to the federal judge involved and a balanced presentation, the decision was without prejudice to being revisited in the context of a motion to quash the subpoena). Neither Samsung nor Canada had notice of the application. And since no arbitral tribunal had been formed at the time of the application, there was initially no tribunal to notify. And it is inferrable from a recent procedural order in the arbitration that the Tribunal, after it was constituted in June 2012, did not learn of the application until some time after the Court entered its order granting relief in November.

The district court purported to apply faithfully the “discretionary factors” enumerated by the Supreme Court in the Intel case. And when it came to applying the factor of whether the arbitration process would be advanced by granting 1782 discovery, the Court’s position was that there was no evidence or argument before the Court that the discovery would not advance the arbitration. Of course, since the matter was before the Court ex parte, there was no representation in the proceedings for the view that perhaps the discovery would detract from the NAFTA arbitration proceedings more than it might enhance them.

One might suppose that the Government of Canada, had it had notice of the application, might have informed the Court:

(1) That proceeding ex parte was not justified as the documents sought from Samsung were mainly communications with Ontario that were in Ontario’s possession, and were not at risk for destruction or concealment.

(2) That production of documents exchanged between Samsung and Ontario should proceed under control of the Tribunal.

(3) That internal documents of Samsung, i.e. those not exchanged with Ontario, were sufficiently less likely to have probative value that the Tribunal’s views should be heard by the Court before granting the discovery.

(4) That the seat of the arbitration had not yet been determined, leaving two potentially important questions: Would the seat be in the U.S. such that the Tribunal might issue its own subpoena? And is a tribunal seated in the U.S. an “international tribunal” under Section 1782 notwithstanding, because constituted under authority of the NAFTA and the UNCITRAL Rules of Arbitration?

The views of this Tribunal in regard to the actual and potential use of Section 1782 might usefully be considered by U.S. courts in future cases, when they are asked to use a crystal ball to divine the attitude of an absent, silent, distant, and perhaps not-yet-constituted, arbitral tribunal:

1) Among the reasons expressed by the Tribunal in its February 26, 2013 Procedural Order in Mesa v. Canada for preferring a U.S. seat of arbitration was the power of a U.S.-seated Tribunal to subpoena evidence under FAA Section 7. While the Tribunal in this context did not directly address the relative merit of using Section 1782 to gather evidence for use in an arbitration seated outside the U.S., it is inferrable that the Tribunal considered that FAA Section 7 provides the Tribunal with more control over the gathering and use of evidence.

2) The Tribunal in opting for a seat in Miami rather than New York referred to Second Circuit case law that could be read to prohibit a New York-seated Tribunal from issuing enforceable subpoenas for witnesses beyond the subpoena power of a federal district court in New York. (Dynegy Midstream Services v. Trammochem, 451 F.3d 89 (2d Cir. 2006)). The Eleventh Circuit having as yet not imposed such a territorial limitation nor excluded the possibility that a Tribunal’s FAA subpoena power is a function of its physical not its juridical seat, Miami (amidst its other attractions) held out the greater possibility for the Tribunal to subpoena evidence from sources in Texas and California.

3) While rejecting Canada’s request for wholesale exclusion of documents gathered through the Section 1782 applications by Claimant, the Tribunal did direct that “further efforts by the Claimant to obtain evidence on Section 1782 be pursued exclusively under the supervision of the Tribunal,”  and, specifically, ordered periodic reporting on the status of ongoing 1782 proceedings and that the parties obtain authorization in advance from the Tribunal for any new 1782 application.

Imagine also how a federal district judge might react, when challenged to anticipate the views of the Tribunal, if she were told that in the Caratube v Kazakhstan case (Procedural Order No. 3, May 26, 2010, found at www.italaw.com ) the Tribunal had remarked that “the Tribunal might have been minded to find that its prior consent should have been sought by Claimant before the presentation of it Section 1782 petition,” and that “the existence of such a petition to domestic courts cannot interfere with the Tribunal’s maintenance of its authority over the arbitral procedure…” Judges in future cases might well respond as did the U.S. District Court judge in Washington D.C. who denied Caratube’s Section 1782 petition a few months later (opinion also found at www.italaw.com), finding among other things that granting the petition in an ICSID arbitration, a process selected by Claimant as one of the dispute resolution options under the U.S.-Kazakhstan BIT, would undermine the parties’ bargained-for expectations about the Tribunal’s involvement in evidence-gathering. And the Court also cited Rule 3.8 of the IBA Rules of Evidence, which Rules Claimant itself had proposed that the Tribunal adopt as guidelines in the proceedings, and which Rule 3.8 specifically directs that third-party evidence Ggathering is a matter for the Tribunal to decide and to implement.

Given the evident differences in outcome and judicial attitude between the ruling on an ex parte application in Mesa v. Canada, and the better-informed position of the Court in Caratube v. Kazakhstan, it is predictable that more Claimants seeking the benefits of Section 1782 will try to do so ex parte whenever possible and also as early in the arbitration process as possible including before any proceedings are filed. The organized arbitration bar might make a constructive contribution by developing a checklist of questions which U.S. District Court judges might pose to applicants:

• What extreme circumstances justify ex parte relief?

• Has the Request for Arbitration been filed?

• Has the Tribunal been constituted?

• Have the parties agreed that the Tribunal shall refer, for guidance, to the IBA Rules of Evidence?

• Has a procedural timetable been fixed?

• Has the seat of arbitration been selected, and if not, does it remain possible that a U.S. seat will be selected?

• Is the information sought mainly not available from the parties to the arbitration, and as to such information what is its probative value?

• Have members of the Tribunal and especially the presiding arbitrator issued prior decisions or written commentaries on the relative roles of arbitral tribunals and domestic courts in the evidence-gathering process?

• Has the administering institution agreed upon by the parties, if any, adopted a position concerning Section 1782 applications?

Armed with such questions, federal judges stand to be better equipped to make the discretionary analysis called for by the Supreme Court in Intel, and to exercise such discretion with an informed sensitivity to many aspects of the arbitral process that the Claimant in pursuit of evidence would not necessarily illuminate.

Today’s topic is the power of a US District Court, if any, to reconsider its recognition and enforcement of a foreign arbitral award governed by the New York Convention when, after giving a judgment confirming the award here in the U.S., the award is vacated by a competent court at the foreign seat of the arbitration. And if such power exists, when should it be exercised?

To set the stage, suppose the award creditor seeks confirmation in the US, and the award debtor opts at that stage not to commence vacatur (annulment) proceedings at the seat and not to request adjournment of the confirmation case pending a vacatur action at the seat (NY Convention Art. VI), but instead initially devotes its energy to an ultimately unsuccessful effort to convince the US District Court to deny confirmation on the basis that the Tribunal lacked jurisdiction over a non-signatory claimant (an issue the US court declines to review de novo, giving deference to the Arbitral Tribunal’s award). The vacatur action at the arbitral seat’s court then unfolds as Round Two of the match, and there the award debtor obtains de novo review of the non-signatory claimant issue, and wins an adjudication vacating the award entirely. Now the award has ceased to exist in two places for opposite reasons: in the US, it is merged into the confirmation judgment; at the seat, it has been annulled.

In Round Three, award debtor asks the US Court to set aside its confirmation judgment, and enter a new judgment refusing confirmation, and says (i) the post-judgment timing and prior history should make no difference, and (ii) that the outcome should be the same as it would have been if the annulment of the award at the seat had preceded initial confirmation. (See Convention Article V(1)(e)).

Strictly speaking, the issue does not arise under the Convention or FAA Chapter Two, but only under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The Convention speaks to the ability of a court to refuse recognition and enforcement, but says nothing directly about revoking recognition and enforcement once given. It might be said the Convention treats the matter indirectly as a question of local procedure because, under Art. III, awards are to be enforced “in accordance with rules of procedure of the territory where the award is relied upon.” Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b) concerning setting aside a judgment would seem to be such a rule.

Rule 60(b) offers two conceivable approaches for this proposed reconsideration. Under Rule 60(b)(5), a party may be relieved from a final judgment that is “based on an earlier judgment that has been reversed or vacated” or because applying the judgment prospectively “is no longer equitable.” Under Rule 60(b)(6) relief from a judgment may be obtained for “any other reason that justifies” it. The latter is considered (in case law) to be “an extraordinary remedy which may be invoked only upon a showing of exceptional circumstances.“

The argument can be made that Article VI of the Convention, alone or in combination with Article V, resolves the issue. Article VI provides that a court “may, if it considers it proper, adjourn the decision on enforcement of the award” but only if an annulment application at the seat “has been made….” (emphasis supplied). It follows that an award debtor who is contemplating but has not yet filed an annulment case has no right to an Article VI stay and indeed a Court giving a stay in such circumstances would be ignoring clearly selected words in the Convention, words presumably chosen because the drafters considered it important to an efficient confirmation regime that unhappy award debtors should decide quickly whether to pursue annulment.

It follows that an applicant for an Article VI stay who submits only that annulment proceedings are being considered has no right to the relief. Article V(1)(e) permits refusal of confirmation only as to an award that has been annulled — not one that might be annulled. And the Convention identifies no circumstance — post-confirmation annulment or otherwise — in which a confirmation order or judgment might be reconsidered and revoked.

So how should a court address the potential Rule 60 grounds for relief from a confirmation judgment. Rule 60(b)(5) seems unpromising. It provides for relief from a judgment that is “based upon” an “earlier judgment” that has been vacated. This Rule language dates from 1937, so there is little reason to think that Congress meant for foreign arbitral awards or foreign judgments to be among the “earlier judgments” to which the 60(b)(5) would apply. Moreover, a quick look at case law regarding 60(b)(5) reveals that “based upon” means that the prior judgment was a necessary element of the judgment from which relief is sought, in the sense that it gave rise to the cause of action of defense upon which the challenged judgment is based. (Lowry Dev., L. L. C. v. Groves & Assocs., 690 F.3d 382, 386 (5th Cir. 2012). The judgment confirming an arbitral award is not “based upon” the award in this sense; the judgment flows from the existence of the award and not from any substantive element of the award.

But what about the 60(b)(6)? Is the post-confirmation foreign annulment an “exceptional circumstance”? Exceptionality would need to be based on giving effect to the mandate of the Convention that recognition should be refused to awards annulled by a court at the seat. But the more precise formulation of the Convention’s mandate is that (i) recognition should not be given to an award annulled at the seat prior to its recognition in a particular jurisdiction where recognition is sought, and (ii) recognition may in a court’s discretion be delayed if there is pending a proceeding in which such annulment might be obtained. Therefore the mandate of the Convention would seem to be that delay in commencing annulment proceedings carries with it the consequence that an annullable award will be confirmed and that the resulting judgment will be enforceable where rendered, and perhaps internationally, even if the underlying award loses its force and its direct enforceability elsewhere. And by extension no Rule 60(b)(6) exceptional circumstance exists unless the award debtor could not have timely commenced the annulment proceedings and requested the Article VI adjournment.

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At least a few readers will recognize that the issue discussed above is presented by a recent Rule 60(b) motion in a case in the Southern District of New York that has been a fertile ground for examination of international arbitration issues in recent years. See Thai-Lao Lignite (Thailand) Co. v. Government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 2013 WL 1703873 (S.D.N.Y. April 19, 2013) (decision granting vacatur of post-judgment restraining notices against certain sovereign assets on sovereign immunity grounds). For readers interested in the motion, it can be found in the electronic docket for Case 10cv5256 at entry no. 203.

In its broader implications, Thai-Lao Lignite entailed the question whether a court reviews an arbitrator’s decision on her jurisdiction with deference (rather than de novo) when the parties agreed to arbitrate under rules such as the UNCITRAL Rules that give arbitrators power to rule on their own jurisdiction. The district court answered this question “yes, at least where the jurisdiction issue is raised by a signatory of the arbitration agreement who concedes its existence and questions only whether a particular non-signatory may invoke it.” The US Second Circuit affirmed that ruling in a summary order based on its decisions in Contec and Chevron, and on February 25, 2013 the Supreme Court of the United States denied certiorari. Whether that issue will eventually reach the Supreme Court will be much-watched, and in the meantime the wisdom and scope of application of the Second Circuit position will be much-debated.

Does an arbitrator exceed her powers when, as a remedy for fraud in the inducement of a limited-duration intellectual property license, she modifies the contract “as a matter of law” to provide the licensor with a perpetual royalty-free license? The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, reversing a Texas district court’s vacatur order, held that the arbitrator’s award should stand. (Timegate Studios, Inc. v. Southpeak Interactive, L.L.C., 2013 WL 1437710 (5th Cir. April 9, 2013)).

Even though the question presented was whether the arbitrator could rewrite the contract as a fraud remedy, the Court held that the relevant legal test under Section 10(a)(4) of the Federal Arbitration Act (permitting vacatur where an arbitrator exceeds her powers) is whether the award “draws its essence from the contract.”

So it is useful to understand where the “draws its essence” formula comes from. It source is in a very famous Supreme Court arbitration case: United Steelworkers of America v. Enterprise Wheel & Car Corp., 363 U.S. 593 (1960). That case involved a labor arbitration under a collective bargaining agreement, and the Supreme Court, referring not to the FAA but to the need for finality in the resolution of labor disputes under collective bargaining agreements, stated: “The arbitrator … does not sit to dispense his own brand of industrial justice; he may of course look for guidance from many sources, yet his award is legitimate only so long as it draws its essence from the collective bargaining agreement.” 363 U.S. at 597.

The Supreme Court has not seen fit in 53 years to incorporate the “draws its essence” phrase into the lexicon of commercial arbitration and the FAA. Not a single instance of reference to the “draws its essence” phrase is found in any FAA case in the Supreme Court.  That might be due to some key differences between collective bargaining agreements and commercial contracts, and between disputes under the two types of agreements. Perhaps most significantly, when a dispute arises under the collective bargaining agreement, that agreement is in practical terms the applicable law.  In the particular dispute, the labor arbitrator decides the respective rights and duties of employee and employer under a collective agreement which is likely to be a lengthy and self-contained charter. Certainly the steel industry agreements circa 1960 fit that mold.

But the commercial agreement with an arbitration clause typically requires the arbitrator to apply the contract law of a particular geopolitical unit, and typically does not limit the remedies of either side to those enumerated in the contract but leaves the arbitrator free to impose the contract remedies permitted by the applicable law. In that context, judicial deference to an award whose remedy “draws its essence” from the contract risks becoming formula for the arbitrator and the deferential reviewing court to disregard the applicable law in service of a generous construction of the contract’s commercial terms. This strengthens but also possibly transforms the arbitral process, inviting the process to become less of an adjudication and more of a binding form of conciliation.

Does a “binding conciliation” vision of arbitral power explain the Fifth Circuit’s decision? Nothing explicit in the decision suggests this. The Court seems to have been less attentive to the implications for arbitral power, and mainly attuned to the injury sustained by this particular licensee. The Court’s opinion does not suggest that the applicable Texas law of contracts provided that a court or arbitrator may rewrite the parties’ agreement “as a matter of law.”  Indeed the Court’s opinion does not discuss Texas contract law. The sole reference to Texas law is the statement that where there is fraud in the inducement of the contract, the remedy granted may “void contract provisions.”  But here the Court cited only to a case where punitive damages for fraud were awarded in conjunction with declaring null and void a contract, induced by fraud, that forbade punitive damages as a breach of contract remedy.

By using the “draws its essence” test to uphold the award, the Court in effect holds that even a remedy not allowed by the applicable law is not an excess of arbitral power where it plausibly advances the original contractual objectives of the prevailing party. But doesn’t that approach dislodge the applicable law as a defining and confining source of arbitral power?

Another drawback of transposing the “draws its essence” formula to commercial arbitration jurisprudence is that the commercial arbitrator routinely is invited to resolve non-contractual causes of action, and yet the “draws its essence” formula is focused on the contract. The fraud claim in the Timegate case is typical.

When the arbitrator is alleged to have exceeded her powers in providing a re-written perpetual license as a remedy for fraudulent inducement of the negotiated license , it seems the proper question to ask, about the scope of arbitral power, is not whether that remedy “draws its essence from the contract,” but whether the remedy is permitted by the law applicable to the fraud claim that the arbitrator was required to apply (or possibly by a more specific agreement of the parties about remedies). If the remedy of contract revision is allowed by (suppose) Oklahoma law, but the contract specifies that the arbitrator shall apply Texas law and the arbitrator is informed that Texas law permits rescinding the contract entirely but not rewriting it, as a remedy for fraud in the inducement, and the arbitrator invokes Oklahoma law on the basis that it strikes her as a more desirable remedial scheme, the arbitrator exceeds her powers, as she was given no power in the contract to invoke any other than Texas law.

The Supreme Court in the 2010 Stolt-Nielsen case gave renewed vitality in “exceeds powers” jurisprudence to the phrase from the 1960 Steelworkers’ case that immediately adjoins the “draws its essence” language, i.e. that an arbitrator exceeds her powers when she dispenses her “own brand of industrial justice.” In Stolt-Nielsen, this label was pinned on an arbitral award that construed an arbitration clause to allow for class arbitration, doing so (according to Justice Alioto and the majority) without reference to any body of law arguably applicable to that clause, but instead by reference to other AAA clause construction awards that had allowed class arbitration.

Whether one agrees or not that this is what the arbitrators did in Stolt-Nielsen, the “own brand of industrial justice” phrase is a sensible practical shorthand for adjudication unhinged from the applicable law that the arbitrator is bound to apply. To sustain, as the Fifth Circuit did, an arbitral revision of the parties’ contract on the basis that the revision “draws its essence” from the contract, would seem to sanction the same unhinging as a legitimate exercise of arbitral power but without adequately justifying how the contract functions as a source for that power.

Evidently undaunted by the Second Circuit’s dismissal of an award confirmation case on grounds of forum non conveniens (Figueiredo Ferraz E Engharia de Projeta Ltda. v. Republic of Peru, 665 F.3d 384 (2d Cir. 2011)) — or at least convinced of the Figueiredo panel majority’s idiosyncratic take on the “public interest” factor in forum non analysis — a federal district judge in New York recently denied a forum non conveniens motion to dismiss a confirmation action between Antiguan parties on both sides, arising from an arbitration that took place in Puerto Rico. (Leeward Constr.  Co. v. American Univ. of Antigua,  2013 WL 1245549 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 26, 2013)).

But what may be most significant to award confirmation jurisprudence in the Leeward case is that the Court granted the motion to dismiss the confirmation petition, without prejudice, made by a non-party to the arbitration, and non-signatory to the arbitration agreement, against whom confirmation was sought via piercing of the corporate veil. Citing a Second Circuit decision from 1963 — predating the US accession to the New York Convention — the Court held that an award confirmation action against the award debtor is not the proper time to raise, for the first time, whether a putative alter ego of the award debtor is also legally responsible to satisfy the award. The Court then hastened to add that the award creditor was free to bring a “separate plenary action” to enforce the award against the putative alter ego.

The Court did not refer to any of the grounds for refusal of recognition in Article V of the New York Convention as a basis for this decision. But if Judge Kaplan considered (as he presumably did) that no such ground was needed, he would appear to have been fully justified. This decision should be classified not as a refusal to recognize the award, but as only a docket-management decision reflecting the application of a sound procedural principle: if confirmation depends upon an initial determination that the defendant consented to arbitrate and did indeed participate in the arbitration (because, as a matter of law, it is one entity with the nominal award debtor), that issue must be litigated in a separate case. The pro-arbitration logic of such a principle is that confirmation proceedings are intended to be “summary,” which is to say resolvable quickly by motion practice without discovery or trial, while issues of consent to arbitrate (such as veil piercing) may well require discovery and trial and therefore should be handled separately. It would seem that such a rule is a “rule of procedure” within the meaning of New York Convention Article III which requires that awards be recognized and enforced “in accordance with the rules of procedure of the territory where the award is relied upon.”

Aficionados of Figueiredo and its main antecedent, the Monde Re case (In the Matter of Arbitration between Monegasque de Reassurances S.A.M.(Monde Re) v. NAK Naftogaz of Ukraine, 311 F.3d 488 (2d Cir. 2002)), will see the close parallel between the Leeward case and Monde Re — where, in the confirmation action,  the award creditor sought conformation against the Republic of Ukraine as alleged alter ego of the award state agency Naftogaz. The solution endorsed by the Second Circuit in Monde Re was to dismiss the entire confirmation action on forum non grounds because the law and fact questions raised by the alter ego claim were better suited to resolution in a court in the Ukraine.

Perhaps the Second Circuit will soon have occasion to endorse Judge Kaplan’s approach in Leeward, which should render Monde Re if not overruled then at least recognized as less helpful solution to the tensions injected into confirmation cases when they are brought against defendants who were not participants in the arbitration.

What then should a court do when, in a separate “plenary action” like the one invited by Judge Kaplan, against only the non-signatory/non-party/alleged alter ego, forum non conveniens is raised as a basis to ship the case abroad? Here it may be useful to view the “plenary action” as a hybrid. It is in its main part an action to recognize an agreement to arbitrate, and as such is governed by Article II of the New York Convention. Article II commands that Contracting States “shall recognize” an arbitration agreement, and lacks the “rules of procedure” language of Article III that the Second Circuit relied upon in Monde Re and Figueiredo to apply forum non conveniens.  It seems correct therefore to suppose that the Court has a categorical duty under the Convention, as a treaty of the United States, to decide whether the non-party is bound by the arbitration agreement even if this involves issues of foreign law, depends on evidence located abroad, and perhaps even implicates issues of public policy of the foreign State.

It has been nearly 45 years since the Supreme Court of the United States decided the Commonwealth Coatings case (Commonwealth Coatings Corp. v. Continental Casualty Co., 393 U.S. 145 (1968)) and addressed for the only time in its history the meaning of the term “evident partiality,” which appears in Chapter One of the FAA as a ground for setting aside an Award. No single opinion or rationale commanded a majority of the Justices in that case, and the legacy of the case has been generally associated with the concurring opinion of Justice White, who was able to support the affirmance of the judgment on the basis that the record supported a finding of actual bias while he rejected the notion, articulated in the plurality opinion authored by Justice Hugo Black, that arbitrators should be held to the same ethical standards as judges and therefore their awards should be exposed to vacatur if the record supports merely an appearance of possible bias.

Earlier this month the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit had occasion to visit the Commonwealth Coatings opinions in an appeal involving allegations of bias baed on the sole arbitrator’s failure to have disclosed election campaign contributions received from the parent company of the victorious Respondent. But in this case there had also been campaign contributions to the arbitrator (who ran for election to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania) in a much larger amount from the law firm that represented the disappointed claimant-appellant. And the contributions were all reported publicly on a Website maintained by the State.  The Third Circuit, adhering to the “actual bias” view of “evident partiality,” found no merit in the position that the award should be vacated. (Freeman v. Pittsburgh Glass Works LLC, 2013 WL 811884 (3d Cir. Mar. 6, 2013)).

The Third Circuit also took this occasion to warn its readers that judges should not hesitate to award sanctions for frivolous vacatur motions and frivolous appeals, as a measure to protect the efficacy of arbitration (although no sanctions were imposed in this case).

It is useful to take note of the utility of the “actual bias” approach to “evident partiality” in discouraging frivolous appeals from arbitral awards. While arbitrators are justifiably criticized for failing to err on the side of caution by disclosing relevant but non-disqualifying information (like the receipt of judicial election campaign funds, publicly-disclosed, from persons connected to both sides), it is another matter to invoke “evident partiality” in service of a retroactive review of pre-award arbitrator disclosure where the proceedings have been fundamentally fair and bear no trace of partisanship in either the outcome or the procedure. Actual bias being both more difficult to prove and more dependent than appearance of bias on the objective elements of the arbitral record (the Award, the procedural orders, the transcript of the hearing), there should in principle be an inhibition of speculative appeals and on efforts to support such speculation with post-award “detective work” to unearth some conceivable basis to impugn an arbitrator’s neutrality. But in practice such litigation remains an epidemic, linked one would suppose to the reluctance of judges to impose sanctions and the unwillingness of Congress to adopt statutory fee-shifting for FAA cases.

Perhaps the Third Circuit’s admonition will gain traction in the district courts, and post-award litigation will gradually become a risky strategy that counsel for losing parties will be more reluctant to recommend.

Some rules and principles relating to enforcement of international arbitration awards are essentially matters of common sense.  Foremost among them are rules relating to the currency of judgments enforcing awards, and post-award interest. But as they are not often the subjects of reasoned judicial decisions, it is useful to take note when well-reasoned decisions come along. Today’s text is from a federal district court in Washington D.C., which addressed currency conversion and interest issues associated with a judgment enforcing a large arbitration award, made in London and rendered in British pounds and Nigerian niara, against the Federal Government of Nigeria. (Continental Transfert Technique Ltd. v. Federal Government of Nigeria, 2013 WL 1201380 (D.D.C. Mar. 26, 2013)).

Common sense rule number one: An award denominated in a foreign currency ordinarily should be converted into a U.S. judgment in U.S. dollars unless the award creditor asks for judgment in the non-dollar currency of the award. One might suppose there could be another exception: where the agreement of the parties provides that the parties shall bear the risk of currency fluctuations even after a breach of termination of their contract.

Common sense rule number two:  Conversion to judgment dollars of an arbitration award denominated in a foreign currency should be made as of a date, ordinarily the award date, that preserves the value of the award for the award creditor in case of intervening depreciation of the award currency.  While this is the approach commended by the Restatement of Foreign Relations Law, two U.S. Supreme Court cases from the 1920s indicated that courts should look to the law under which the cause of action arose and convert the foreign currency obligation to dollars as of the date of breach only if the plaintiff had a cause of action under American law as of that date. Fortunately the district court here was able to navigate this arguable conflict, and find that indeed there was a cause of action under U.S. law (to enforce the award under the New York Convention/FAA) as of the date of the award (that being the “date of breach” of an obligation to satisfy the award).

Common sense rule number three: The award creditor is presumptively entitled to post-award, pre-judgment interest, so long as the award does not negate the existence of this entitlement, although the entitlement remains in the Court’s discretion (so that it might be denied for instance of the creditor failed to proceed diligently with enforcement).

The final point of decision in this case was selection of the prejudgment interest rate, and the court concluded that the prime rate more properly comports with the compensatory rationale for such interest than does the Treasury Bill rate.  I hesitate to classify this as a “common sense rule,” however, because the decision to terminate the accrual of interest at the pre-award rate specified in the award is not intuitive and inevitable. Here the court gave short shrift to that question as the pre-award rate granted under Nigerian law was 18 percent based on prevailing interest rates in Nigeria during the relevant period, and the award creditor evidently did not present argument as to why the Court should continue this rate in effect post-award. But suppose the pre-award rate had been nine percent based the New York law having been the applicable law of the contract?  Although presumably that would be significantly above the award creditor’s cost of funds, in that instance the level of compensation for the time value of unpaid obligations has been bargained for, and the effect of shifting to the prime rate for post-award interest is to deprive the award creditor of the benefit of the bargain.