Originally from American Review of International Arbitration - ARIA

Preview Page

The general notion of arbitrability is practically as old as arbitration itself, and
yet it remains profoundly misunderstood, at least in U.S. arbitration law. For
many – particularly outside the United States – arbitrability has a single and very
precise meaning, signifying the legal capacity of a claim or dispute to be the
subject of arbitration rather than litigation1 or, to borrow the language of the
UNCITRAL Model Law2 and the New York Convention,3 signifying that a claim
or dispute is “legally capable of being arbitrated.” By this understanding, a claim
or dispute is “non-arbitrable” within a given legal system if the system’s
legislature or, less commonly, the system’s courts acting on their own determine
that its adjudication is reserved, as a matter of law, to the courts of that system.
This represents what may be called arbitrability stricto sensu. To determine
whether a claim or dispute is arbitrable or not, in this sense of the term, one needs
essentially to consult the statute books and judicial gloss that may have been given
to any particular statutory claim.
The narrowness of this definition of arbitrability has important consequences.
In the first place, under this definition, the arbitrability or non-arbitrability of a
claim or dispute should be readily ascertainable. It should not depend on the
factual circumstances surrounding the claim. Used in this way, arbitrability
entails a purely legal inquiry. Thus, however else one may understand the
principle of arbitrator competence-competence,4 that principle would not prevent a