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Written witness statements in lieu of oral testimony on direct examination have long been a staple of international arbitration hearing practice.  Civil trial practice in the United States, however, has long followed the custom of oral direct examination of witnesses on each party’s case-in-chief.  Practice in U.S. domestic arbitration has followed the custom in the trial courts. But adoption of written direct testimony as a civil trial convention may be the new wave in U.S. trial practice. Among the 16 judges of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York who revised their individual rules of practice…
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On April 27, 2011, some 86 years after the passage of the US Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”), five justices of the United States Supreme Court declared that arbitration “as envisioned by the FAA” does not include class arbitration because class arbitration cases (i) predictably involve high stakes which arbitrators are not suited to handle, (ii) predictably involve an unacceptable risk of unreviewable arbitral error because of the high stakes, (iii) invariably require procedural formality that is at odds with arbitration’s “principal advantage” of informality, and (iv) invariably require that formal rules be applied by arbitrators who, as a group, are…
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Recently a US district judge in New York dismissed, for improper venue, a New York Convention award-enforcement action against the Republic of Bulgaria by an Israeli company that had won a $10.3 million award against Bulgaria and its Privatization Agency in an ad hoc UNCITRAL Rules arbitration in Paris. The basis for dismissal was that the sales contract between the Agency and the Israeli firm (for purchase of a controlling stake in Bulgaria’s state-owned airline) contained a forum selection clause providing that “execution” of any Award “against the Seller” would be conducted exclusively in Bulgarian courts. (Zeevi Holdings Ltd. v….
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Last week a US district judge in New York dismissed, for improper venue, a New York Convention award-enforcement action, against the Republic of Bulgaria, by an Israeli company that had won a $10.3 million award against Bulgaria and its Privatization Agency after an ad hoc UNCITRAL Rules arbitration in Paris. The basis for dismissal was that the sales contract between the Agency and the Israeli firm (for purchase of a controlling stake in Bulgaria’s state-owned airline) provided that “execution” of any Award “against the Seller” would be conducted exclusively in Bulgarian courts. (Zeevi Holdings Ltd. v. Republic of Bulgaria, 2011…
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The New York Convention provides in Article VI that a court may stay or postpone decision on an enforcement petition in case an action to set aside the award is pending in a court at the seat of the arbitration. The less-heralded and less-invoked Inter-American (“Panama”) Convention similarly provides in its Article VI that enforcement proceedings may be stayed or postponed “[i]f the competent authority in Article 5(1)(e)” — i.e., the court at the seat of arbitration — “has been requested to annul or suspend the arbitral decision.” US courts asked to stay enforcement proceedings pending vacatur proceedings in courts…
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The question whether the US Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) permits a cause of action that seeks only the relief of a stay or injunction against arbitration proceedings has arisen in several recent cases mentioned in Arbitration Commentaries, including the Chevron v. Ecuador saga, in which the Second Circuit decided not to decide this undecided question, finding that neither Ecuador nor the plaintiffs in the Ecuador environmental litigation against Chevron had shown grounds for such a stay of Chevron’s investment arbitration against the Republic of Ecuador. The question was raised again in a case decided last week, involving a more mundane…
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