Originally from Pro-Arbitration Revisited: A Tribute to Professor George Bermann from his Students Over the Years

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The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and its supervisory court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, are arguably the most important courts in the world of international arbitration. Two recent developments have made this so.

First, in 2017 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals determined that a petition to recognize an ICSID award had to be filed in the DC District Court, not the Southern District of New York (or anywhere else). That judgment, Mobil Cerro Negro, Ltd. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 863 F.3d 96 (2d. Cir. 2017), performed a sophisticated analysis of the interaction between 22 U.S.C. § 1650a (the statute implementing obligations under the ICSID Convention into domestic law) and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The outcome sent a clear message to successful claimants: if you want to enforce an ICSID award in the United States, you have to start in the nation’s capital. New York remains America’s financial center and, for that reason, will always play an important role in the enforcement of arbitral awards. But in this instance—contrary to its usual habit—New York ceded its prominence to DC.