Second-Guessing Arbitral Tribunals (New York Law Journal)
New York Law Journal, May 24, 2017
Second-Guessing Arbitral Tribunals
“In recent years, as arbitration has become increasingly used to resolve international commercial disputes, there has been sotto voce competition among venues for the siting of international arbitrations. Two of the most important venues are London and New York. One of the accusations about problems allegedly existing in arbitrations in New York—and indeed elsewhere in the United States—is the supposedly important doctrine of ‘manifest disregard of the law,’ a nonstatutory, judicially derived basis for challenging arbitral awards that can entail a court examining the record before the arbitral tribunal to determine whether it flouted an important legal principle that was material to the award….We discussed, in our article in this Journal in 2013, that, according to a study done by the International Commercial Disputes Committee of the New York City Bar, there is in fact little to fear from applications made on the basis of manifest disregard, particularly with respect to international arbitration awards, because awards have very seldom been set aside on the basis of it.”
