More on Appealability of Arbitral Awards

A couple weeks ago, we talked about the basic un-appealability of arbitral awards, and the idea that any potential alternative rule must be pursued at the front-end: parties can contract for some sort of appellate review of an arbitral award, but if it’s not in the arbitration clause there is nothing beyond what the FAA or the TAA (in Texas) allows, plus extremely limited non-statutory grounds for challenging confirmation of awards. Which is to say, for the most part, that arbitral awards are not appealable.

We should have mentioned, of course, that while drafting some sort of appellate review into an arbitration clause is (we think) allowable in Texas and the Fifth Circuit, it is not possible everywhere. On Monday, the ICM’s blog posted a great memo laying out the different approaches taken by various federal circuits on this issue. Amazing how timing works out some times.

Finally, I would note that we’ve written a fairly detailed CLE paper on this very subject, which is linked-to in our prior post on this topic (I’m not linking again because a whole section of the prior paper was rendered obsolete by the Positive Software en banc opinion). We’ve updated the paper once, but it’s due for another update, which should happen in the next couple weeks as Karl gets ready for a CLE talk in Corpus Christi. Once we finish the updated paper I’ll post a link.

Technorati Tags:
arbitration, ADR, law