Tagged: interlocutory arbitral award

“Obtaining vacatur in federal courts is just as difficult as in New York courts under the CPLR. Arbitration awards are not set aside for errors, whether in law or fact. In at least one circuit, vacatur has been denied where the arbitrator’s decision was deemed arbitrary and capricious by the district court. Because arbitrators are not bound by substantive law or the rules of evidence, they need not follow ‘the niceties observed by the federal courts,’ and they may, for example, refer to evidence not included in the record. Such discrepancies in the arbitration process do not provide valid grounds for vacatur or modification. Arbitration proceedings may be imprecise, so long as each party is afforded fair process.” 

If it’s so “difficult” for the federal judges to vacate an arbitrator’s award, why was it so easy for the fraudulently appointed “arbitrator” in my case — Schnader LLP attorney Timothy K. Lewis — to vacate David L. Gregory’s (the original & lawfully appointed arbitrator) Partial Final Award, which found William Morris guilty of discriminating against me “in violation of pertinent federal, state, and local law prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of race”? If federal P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New YOrk couldn’t uphold the law on this procedural issue, how can anyone take any of his other decisions seriously???

Source: Mitchell L. Shapiro. “Court Drastically Limit Review Of Arbitration Award.” The New York Law Journal. October 19, 2015. http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/id=1202740028271/Courts-Drastically-Limit-Review-of-Arbitration-Awards?slreturn=20150921063811.

“The Eighth Circuit has held that an interlocutory award may be deemed final for functus officio purposes if the award states it is final, and if the arbitrator intended it to be final. See, e.g., Legion Ins. Co. v. VCW, Inc., 198 F.3d 718, 720 (8th Cir. 1999). We adopt the criteria used by the Eighth Circuit, and apply them to the instant case.”

Source: Bosack v. Soward, 586 F.3d 1096, 1103 (9th Cir. 2009).

“What renders [Dealer Computer Services, Inc. v. Dub Herring Ford, 547 F.3d 558 (6th Cir. 2008)] significant is that the court of appeals also concluded that under some circumstances, including circumstances not relating to interim measures or interlocutory injunctive relief, an interlocutory arbitral decision that was not final might nonetheless be subject to immediate judicial review based on a finding of ripeness. That the court of appeals also clearly articulated what it believed to be the applicable three-prong test for establishing ripeness, too, would come to have significance in the near future.”

Source: James M. Gaitis. Finality, Ripeness, and Functus Officio: The Interlocutory Arbitral Award Conundrum. Journal of the ACCL. Vol. 7, No. 2. pg. 25. 2013.

“As is often the case when splits in authority develop among the various federal circuits, however, the lack of uniformity did not provide sufficient incentive to bring harmony out of chaos. Rather, in the lead up to Stolt-Nielsen, differing federal courts of appeal not only continued to take divergent courses in addressing those questions but also actually arrived at decisions that further complicated the issues in undesirable ways.”

Source: James M. Gaitis. Finality, Ripeness, and Functus Officio: The Interlocutory Arbitral Award Conundrum. Journal of the ACCL. Vol. 7, No. 2. pg. 19-20. 2013.