Arbitration Proceedings

Arbitration Agreements, Arbitration Institutions and Rules, Arbitration Proceedings, Costs in arbitral proceedings, Disclosure, Domestic Courts, United States

(Castaldi Mourre & Partners)/ /Leave a comment

As is well known, Section 1782(a) provides that a “the district court of the district in which a person resides or is found may order him to give his testimony or statement or to produce a document or other thing for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international tribunal”. The applicability of 28…

Arbitration Proceedings, Costs in arbitral proceedings

(Notre Dame Law School)/ /Leave a comment

“With over 20,000 contracts executed each year, it is simply impossible to address the problems of cost and delay in arbitration through artful drafting.” That was the gist of comments made by a general counsel of a major corporation at last month’s ITA workshop. To which another general counsel on the panel replied, “No, we…

Arbitration Proceedings, Commercial Arbitration, Domestic Courts, South America

(Debevoise & Plimpton LLP)/ /1 Comment
American Society of International Law (ASIL)

This year’s ICCA Congress in Rio de Janeiro not only confirmed that nobody knows to party better than cariocas, but also served as an impressive reminder of the increasing pro-arbitration approach of Brazilian courts, the remarkable growth in the number of arbitration proceedings in Brazil and the high sophistication of the Brazilian arbitration bar. Yet…

Arbitration Proceedings, kompetenz-kompetenz, South America

(M.A. Ribas Law Firm)/ /Leave a comment

Less than two weeks before arbitration practitioners’ eyes turned to Rio de Janeiro for the ICCA Congress 2010, a court from that same jurisdiction rendered a decision improving case law on important matters related to arbitration. On May 12th, 2010, the Tribunal de Justiça do Estado de Rio de Janeiro (which is similar to a…

Arbitration Proceedings, Commercial Arbitration, Enforcement of an arbitration clause, National Arbitration Laws, United States

(Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP)/ /Leave a comment
WilmerHale

Recent legislative developments in Oklahoma, and a few other U.S. states, reflect a growing mistrust of international and foreign law and legal systems. These proposed statutes and constitutional amendments are one aspect of parochial backlash in the United States and elsewhere against developments in international law and dispute resolution over the past decades. There are…

Anti-suit injunction, Arbitration Proceedings, Enforcement of an arbitration clause, Europe

(Debevoise & Plimpton LLP)/ /Leave a comment
YIAG

Having had their wings clipped by the European Court of Justice in West Tankers, the English courts have recently confirmed that there is life in the anti-suit injunction yet. In AES UST-Kamenogorsk Hydropower Plant LLP v UST-Kamenogorsk Hydropower Plant JSC [2010] EWHC 772 (Comm), Burton J granted anti-suit relief to restrain litigation in Kazakhstan even…

Arbitration Proceedings, Section 1782 Discovery

(Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP)/ /Leave a comment
WilmerHale

In the past year, there have been several posts (here , here, and here) on the applicability of 28 U.S.C. § 1782 to international arbitration and on the issuance of conflicting judicial opinions on this topic. As reported by Roger Alford in a recent post , a federal district court in the Southern District of…

Arbitration Proceedings, Investment Arbitration

(Investment Arbitration Reporter)/ /3 Comments

The preliminary hearings in the Pacific Rim v. El Salvador CAFTA arbitration went off without a hitch at the start of this week. I’d like to report that I hung on every word via the live webcast that had been arranged by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. However, I spent my Monday…

Arbitration Agreements, Arbitration Institutions and Rules, Arbitration Proceedings, Commercial Arbitration, Domestic Courts, kompetenz-kompetenz, South America

(Veirano Advogados)/ /Leave a comment
American Society of International Law (ASIL)

The Court of Appeals for the state of Bahia in Brazil recently handed down an arbitration-friendly decision and vacated an injunction intended to stay an arbitration proceeding. In FAT Ferroatlàntica S.L. vs. Zeus Mineração Ltda. and others, the Court of Appeals addressed the issue of whether the existence of conflicting arbitration clauses in contracts pertaining to a single economic transaction justifies judicial intervention at the outset of the arbitration. The Court of Appeals held that, provided an arbitration agreement exists, such issue is to be dealt with by the arbitrators, not by the Courts.

Arbitration Agreements, Arbitration Proceedings, Domestic Courts, Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), Manifest disregard of the law

(White & Case LLP)/ /Leave a comment
White & Case

On April 27, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Stolt-Nielsen S.A. v. AnimalFeeds International Corp., No. 08-1198, 559 U.S. ___ (2010). The Court reversed a Second Circuit ruling permitting arbitrators to impose class arbitration upon four shipping companies—including White & Case client Stolt-Nielsen S.A.—under those shipping companies’ shipping contracts…

Arbitration Institutions and Rules, Arbitration Proceedings, Arbitrators, Disclosure

(International Council for Commercial Arbitration)/ /Leave a comment
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

When it comes time to identify an arbitrator candidate, be it in the investor-state context or in an international commercial arbitration, there are many factors to consider. One such factor, however, that has been the focus of much attention recently by arbitration institutions, practitioners and commentators alike, is arbitrator availability. It is clearly a sore…

Arbitration Proceedings, forum non conveniens, Investment Arbitration, North America, South America

(Notre Dame Law School)/ /1 Comment

Yesterday a federal court in New York granted Chevron’s request for discovery of outtakes from the 2009 documentary Crude about the multi-billion dollar litigation in Ecuador. Chevron’s request was pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1782, which authorizes a judge in the United States to order discovery of evidence to be used in proceedings before a foreign…

Arbitration Awards, Arbitration Proceedings, Arbitrators, Commercial Arbitration, Domestic Courts, Europe

(Castaldi Mourre & Partners)/ /Leave a comment

In recent years, there has been increasing concern about court orders aimed at preventing a party from initiating, continuing or participating in arbitration proceedings (see notably, IAI Series on International Arbitration, no 2, Anti-Suit Injunction in International Arbitration, E. Gaillard ed., 2005; ICCA Congress Series, No 13 International Arbitration 2006, Back to Basics?, A. J….

Arbitration Proceedings, International Courts, Investment Arbitration

(British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL))/ /Leave a comment

King Solomon might have split the baby had he not realised the identity of its parent in time. Judges and arbitrators – some 3,000 years later – might be quicker to identify a company’s real group structure, but are they any better in splitting parent from child-subsidiary? A typical corporate veil piercing case involves a…

Arbitration Agreements, Arbitration Proceedings, Investment Arbitration

(University of Victoria Faculty of Law)/ /Leave a comment

The principle of good faith arises in investment treaty arbitrations in various contexts. Tribunals, of course, regularly refer to Article 31(1) of the Vienna Convention for the rule that treaties shall be interpreted in good faith. Tribunals have noted that states must perform their treaty obligations in good faith. References to good faith occur in…

Arbitration Proceedings, Commercial Arbitration, International Courts

(Norton Rose LLP)/ /Leave a comment
YIAG

Anti-suit injunctions have certainly received their fair share of air time (and some would say more) as a result of the West Tankers debate – about which this blog entry is not. Now that all eyes are on anti-suit injunctions, it is interesting to keep an eye on how the cases post West Tankers pan…

Arbitration Proceedings, Middle East, National Arbitration Laws

(Habib Al Mulla & Co.)/ /1 Comment

On a first reading this might seem like a particularly narrow question. Perhaps geographically of limited utility. But to almost every international organization in the industrial, defence and major projects sectors it is, in fact, one of the burning issues confronting their participation in a market planning to spend or invest $USD450billion in 2010. In…

Arbitration Proceedings, Investment Arbitration, South America

(University of Victoria Faculty of Law)/ /1 Comment

In this blog I return to the theme of investor misconduct, albeit in a different context from my previous posts:  host state criminal investigations during investment treaty arbitration proceedings.  This issue has arisen in a number of recent investment treaty arbitrations, most notably in a series of cases against Turkey (Cementownia, Europe Cement and Libananco),…

Arbitration Proceedings, Arbitrators, Energy Charter Treaty, International Courts, Investment Arbitration

(University of Victoria Faculty of Law)/ /3 Comments

I have always found the submission of expert legal opinions on matters of international law to investment treaty tribunals rather odd.  Why are expert opinions needed and what is their status?  To begin, the opinion is submitted to an international arbitration tribunal often comprising leading public international lawyers (and sometimes current or former judges of…

Arbitration Proceedings, Investment Arbitration, North America

(International Council for Commercial Arbitration)/ /Leave a comment
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer

Following the flurry of arbitrations initiated by investors against Argentina based upon Argentine government actions during that country’s 2001-2002 economic crisis, one might have expected the U.S. government’s extensive market interventions during the 2008 global financial crisis to lead similarly to investor claims. The United States bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in the…

Arbitration Proceedings, Costs in arbitral proceedings

(Conway & Partners)/ /Leave a comment

Earlier I discussed a possible response to a Respondent’s tactical approach to refuse to pay an advance on costs, referring to a previous article I published. This post invited a reaction from readers which I thought worth noting: What do you do when you represent the Respondent who simply cannot afford the fees? I would…

Arbitration Institutions and Rules, Arbitration Proceedings, Investment Arbitration, Other Issues

(University of Victoria Faculty of Law)/ /1 Comment

Procedural Order No. 3 (Confidentiality Order) dated 27 January 2010 in Giovanna a Beccara and others v. The Argentine Republic (the “Order”) addresses the competing considerations of confidentiality, transparency, public information, equality of the Parties’ rights, and orderly conduct of the proceedings in investment treaty arbitration.  Although the Tribunal’s Order provides a nuanced approach to…

Arbitration Proceedings, Costs in arbitral proceedings

(Conway & Partners)/ /1 Comment

It is interesting to consider how to handle the situation when a party refuses to pay its portion of the advance on costs. I have previously published an article on this matter and, looking to the ICC Rules, would recommend an alternative route to the traditionally referenced ones. I will consider the options that exist…

Arbitration Proceedings, Europe, Legislation

(von Segesser Law Offices)/ /Leave a comment

As of 1 January 2011, Swiss domestic arbitration proceedings will be governed by Articles 353 et seq. of the new Swiss Code on Civil Procedure (“CCP”). Articles 353 et seq. CCP will replace the Concordat on Arbitration (“Concordat”), currently governing domestic arbitration proceedings. The dichotomy between domestic arbitration and international arbitration will continue to exist,…