Originally from ADR and the Law - 21st Edition

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In the past two decades arbitration has become the method of choice for resolving commercial disputes in cross-border transactions. Arbitration is a contractually created non-judicial process wherein a neutral arbitrator is empowered to resolve disputes between the parties according to the terms and authority granted to the arbitrator by the contract. With Iraq in a reconstruction phase, an increasing number of major infrastructure, energy, manufacturing and other contracts have been and will continue to be entered into. While the contractors are principally American, there is increasing competition and pressure from elsewhere.  Due to the developing and yet unknown legal framework of Iraq, arbitration is bound to be an element of a majority, if not all, of these contracts. With billions of U.S. dollars  and delicate diplomatic relations at stake, it will be crucial for potential disputes to be resolved without errors of law or fact. Yet the statutory grounds enumerated in Section 10(a) of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) for setting aside arbitral awards does not include errors of law or fact.  On August 29, 2003, in Kyocera Corp. v. Prudential-Bache Trade Services, the en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit considered whether parties should be able to agree in their contract to expand the statutory grounds for review of an arbitral award.