By Mark Kantor

This morning the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari and agreed to hear in its next Term the international arbitration case of GE Energy Power Conversion France SAS v. Outokumpu Stainless USA LLC (Docket No. 18-1048, case documents available at https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/ge-energy-power-conversion-france-sas-v-outokumpu-stainless-usa-llc/).  The dispute addresses whether, under the New York Convention, a non-signatory can compel arbitration.  The Question Presented is:

Whether the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards permits a nonsignatory to an arbitration agreement to compel arbitration based on the doctrine of equitable estoppel.

As described in GE’s petition for cert, “Sometimes, a signatory to a contract may sue a non-signatory for claims that arise out of the contract.  When that happens, is the signatory bound by the arbitration clause it agreed to in the contract?  For domestic arbitration agreements, the answer is yes: Equitable estoppel allows the non-signatory to enforce the arbitration clause.  But the Eleventh Circuit [Court of Appeals] held that a non-signatory cannot compel arbitration if one of the parties is a foreign entity.  That erroneous holding deepens a 2-to-2 circuit split and warrants this Court’s review.”

Readers will note that GE’s quoted description of the issue speaks confusingly about both (i) a signatory compelling arbitration with a non-signatory and (ii) a non-signatory compelling arbitration with a signatory.  One hopes the U.S. Supreme Court will be able to distinguish the two situations and determine whether that distinction is relevant to resolving the question.  The 11^th Circuit decision declining to compel arbitration rested in part on the non-US nature of one of the parties.

We shall learn within the next year how the U.S. Supreme Court believes non-signatories fit into the commercial arbitration universe.

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Mark Kantor is a CPR Distinguished Neutral. Until he retired from Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, Mark was a partner in the Corporate and Project Finance Groups of the Firm. He currently serves as an arbitrator and mediator. He teaches as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center (Recipient, Fahy Award for Outstanding Adjunct Professor). Additionally, Mr. Kantor is Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Transnational Dispute Management.

This material was first published on OGEMID, the Oil Gas Energy Mining Infrastructure and Investment Disputes discussion group sponsored by the on-line journal Transnational Dispute Management (TDM, at https://www.transnational-dispute-management.com/), and is republished with consent.