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Dear Readers: I am en route to Vienna to attend the UNCITRAL Arbitration Working Group Session, in the status of an observer on behalf of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The Working Group is in advanced stages of a proposed revision of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules. I have been asked by the editors of Transnational Dispute Management (TDM) to post reports on the proceedings to its website. I hope you will look for those reports. www.transnational-dispute-management.com.

Dear Readers: A posting on the Kluwer Arbitration Blog by Francesca Richmond discusses some recent UK case law on merits review of arbitration awards in the courts, and alludes briefly to a pending US enforcement case in which a District Court in Washington is asked to deny recognition out of respect for a judgment of a Qatari court under Qatari law, notwithstanding that the seat of the arbitration was Paris. Reproduced below is the comment I have posted on the Kluwer website. Francesca — Your posting inspired me to look at the brief for Respondents in the IITIC/Dyncorp enforcement case,…
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US federal district judges who do not frequently grapple with the New York Convention and Chapter Two of the FAA, and in many Circuits lack clear appellate guidance, often struggle to apply the terms of the treaty and the statute to novel and unusual situations. A new case in point comes from the US District Court in Maryland, which reached a correct result in denying recognition of a partial award while confirming the final award, but missed an opportunity to make an explicit and persuasive application of Article V of the Convention to justify denying recognition to the partial award….
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At the Kluwer Arbitration Blog you will find an interesting comment by Paul Friedland on the Thomas v. Carnival Corp. decision of the Eleventh Circuit. I commented on the Thomas case here on July 7, 2009.Below is the text of my comment today posted on the Kluwer Arbitration Blog. Paul, The concerns you mention are serious ones; yours is a different and insightful reading of a case discussed in my Arbitration Commentaries on July 7, 2009. (http://arbblog.lexmarc.us — “U. S. Public Policy As Basis to Nullify Arbitration Agreement: Beyond the Bounds of Mitsubishi?”) What troubles me most about Thomas is…
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The proposed new text of Article 26 concerning interim measures of protection is a considerable expansion from the 1976 rule. It reflects the extensive practical experience of arbitrators with different types of interim measures. It also reflects the convergence of legal standards into a set a generally applicable transnational norms. The 1976 version of the rule was concise, perhaps to a fault. It permitted the arbitral tribunal to “take any interim measures it deems necessary in respect of the subject matter of the dispute. ” The only specific example mentioned, although not by way of limitation, was “measures for the…
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The Working Group on Arbitration of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) will convene for its 51st session in Vienna, Austria, from September 14-18, 2009. For the past two years, the Working Group has been engaged in developing a proposed revised draft of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules (“Rules”). When completed, this will be the first wholesale revision of the Rules since their initial adoption in 1976. I will attend the Working Group session as a member of the observer delegation of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In this post and ensuing…
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