The Road to the Tribunal and Beyond: International Commercial Arbitration and United States Courts

United States courts recognize the strong federal policy favoring arbitration of disputes involving international commerce. Enforcing parties’ agreements on the forum and rules for resolving potential disputes has been praised as encouraging orderliness and predictability, which are important to international business. Arbitration allows parties engaged in international business to remove a potential dispute from a possibly hostile local judicial forum or one unfamiliar with the problem at issue. Deference to arbitration has also been lauded as providing a healthy respect for the parties’ written promises—even if that means a neutral tribunal, situated outside of the United States, applies foreign law to resolve a dispute.