Recent Posts

We do not often hear about staying enforcement of an award that is subject to recognition and enforcement under the New York Convention – except of course in the scenario where a vacatur action is pending in a court at the seat of the arbitration. After all, the policy of the Convention and the FAA is to expedite recognition and enforcement by defining narrowly the grounds for opposition, and streamlining the proceedings in which those grounds are to be raised and considered. The Convention of course provides no general authority for courts to stay confirmation proceedings. Article VI of the…
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Today Arbitration Commentaries welcomes Nic Fletcher as its newest foreign correspondent. Nic will report for Arbitration Commentaries, from time to time, on UK law and practice developments. He is the Head of International Arbitration in the Litigation and Dispute Resolution team of Berwin Leighton Paisner, resident in the Firm’s London office. Nic is a member of the ICC Task Force on the New York Convention, is the rapporteur for England and Wales of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, and is on the executive committee of the Foundation for International Arbitration Advocacy. Nic can be reached at nicholas.fletcher@blplaw.com, and biographical information…
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That class arbitration in a commercial context remains viable after, and perhaps despite, the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Stolt-Nielsen S.A. v. Animalfeeds Int’l, Inc. (130 S.Ct. 1758), was demonstrated again last week in a decision of the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The Third Circuit affirmed a district court ruling that denied vacatur of an arbitrator’s award permitting class arbitration between the Oxford managed care network and a class of doctors on whose behalf the Claimant brought the case under his individual reimbursement contract with Oxford. (Sutter v. Oxford Health Plans LLC, 2012 WL 1088887. (3d Cir. April…
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  With this post, Arbitration Commentaries begins a new initiative to bring its readers reports on noteworthy arbitration law and practice developments in important jurisdictions outside the United States. In this commentary, Barry Leon, Chair of the International Arbitration Practice Group at Perley, Robertson, Hill & McDougall LLP in Ottawa, Canada (www.perlaw.ca ), and John Siwiec, an associate in that Group, report on a significant recent case from the British Columbia Court of Appeal on the importance of arbitration being expeditious and providing finality — an important appellate court policy pronouncement at a time when users of arbitration, arbitral institutions and…
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Exchanges rates and interest rates are interesting, and important, especially in high-value cases. So one might suppose that a (nominally) Nigerian company involved in a high-stakes London-based arbitration against the Government of Nigeria, and anticipating that it might seek recognition and enforcement of the award elsewhere than in Nigeria, would have given attention during the arbitration to (i) the proper currency of the award, (ii) the convertibility of the award currency into the currency of the enforcing jurisdiction upon entry of judgment confirming the award, (iii) the relevant reference date for currency conversion and (iv) the applicability of the interest…
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The persistent problem of what may be called the “party-disabled arbitrator”  and the resulting “truncated tribunal,” especially in arbitrations involving States, surfaced this month in a federal district court decision from New Orleans.  The party-disabled arbitrator begins the proceedings as the party-appointed arbitrator, but at some point the party determines that its interests are best served by attempting to obstruct the functioning of the tribunal by interfering with the ability of its party-appointee to continue to carry out his or her mandate.  (For a long historical view of the problem, see Judge Stephen Schwebel’s treatment in the 1994 Lord Goff lecture, “The…
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