Over the past 50 years, the international business community has settled on the device of international commercial arbitration to resolve the overwhelming number of disputes that arise in their commercial agreements. One reason is that many business people are suspicious of the domestic courts of many host countries and have always sought the comfort of a neutral forum. Arbitration is neutral (i.e., not tied directly to any particular domestic legal system), efficient, and confidential. Much of this evolution has been triggered by events in the United States in particular a long series of United States Supreme Court decisions that ended the
courts' traditional hostility to arbitration and established, firmly and with virtually no reservations, the legitimacy of arbitration but this line of decisions was not pre-ordained. The fundamental law, the United States Arbitration Act, usually referred to as the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), is cryptic and skeletal in its language and the United States Congress has not seen fit to alter it in any substantial form since it was first enacted in 1925. Virtuallyall the arbitral innovations and pro-arbitration developments in the United States have grown out of a now-long line of court decisions-essentially a kind of common law development-that has moved a great distance away from the nearly-deceptive simplicity of the FAA. All these developments in the United States have fostered similar pro-arbitration innovations around the world. The U.S. view of arbitration has now become the international
norm.