Originally from American Review of International Arbitration - ARIA

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I. INTRODUCTION

Commercial arbitration has been employed in the United States since colonial times; yet even after the passage of the Federal Arbitration Act1 (“FAA”) in 1926,2 courts tended to approach agreements to arbitrate future disputes with skepticism.3 Recent decades, however, have seen a surge in the use of commercial arbitration, spurred by a fundamental change in attitude by federal and state courts which, with the U.S. Supreme Court in the vanguard, for the first time began to perceive the benefits of arbitration.4

By the 1980's, complaints were heard that “the initial judicial hostility to arbitration has shifted to the view that once one has agreed to arbitrate, he has made his bed and must lie in it.”5 Indeed, some commentators have gone so far as to accuse courts of “abandon[ing] altogether any responsibility for supervising the arbitral process.”6