International Arbitration ♦ Article 65 Va. J. Int’l L. 1 (2024)

Challenging and Enforcing International Arbitral Awards in U.S. Federal Courts: An Empirical Study

CHRISTOPHER R. DRAHOZAL, DONALD EARL CHILDRESS III, JACK J. COE, JR. & CATHERINE A. ROGERS

One of the primary reasons why transnational actors prefer international arbitration over international litigation is that they anticipate that those international arbitral awards not voluntarily complied with are highly enforceable in national courts. This assumption is especially forceful with respect to U.S. federal courts. Historically, many commentators have estimated that national courts give effect to about 90% of all awards. When scholars set out to test empirically this estimated 90% rate, however, they reported finding lower rates at which national courts give effect to awards. These empirical studies all suffer from methodological shortcomings that have distorted their results. The primary methodological deficiency of these studies was their reliance on commercial databases, such as Westlaw or the Kluwer Arbitration database. These databases exist for legal research, not empirical research. As a result, they do not contain or purport to contain either a comprehensive or a representative set of cases.