Originally from The American Review of International Arbitration (ARIA)

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The permissibility of multi-contract arbitrations is one of the most controversial modern dilemmas in the field of international arbitration. This article discusses prevalent theories and landmark judgments from various jurisdictions to demonstrate the omnipresence of multi-contract arbitrations across the world, especially in scenarios involving multiple contracts facilitating a single commercial transaction. This omnipresence is also accompanied by the surprising absence of an objective and a uniformly applicable method to assess the permissibility of multi-contract arbitrations. This article proposes a fresh method for assessing the permissibility of multi-contract arbitrations in complex commercial scenarios, which is dubbed as the “fragmented consent framework”. The fragmented consent framework breaks down a party’s consent to arbitrate into consent for four major elements of arbitration and highlights various reasons why “consent to opposing/other arbitrating parties” ought to be considered irrelevant for multi-contract arbitration related questions. The article concludes by reanalyzing cases involving multi-contract arbitration requests to demonstrate how the fragmented consent framework is ideal to replace the currently applicable theories and doctrines, which are non-uniform and ambiguous. The article argues in favour of multi-contract arbitrations and also in favour of the use of the “fragmented consent framework” for the assessment of multi-contract arbitration requests.