ZF Auto. v. Luxshare: Supreme Court’s Withdrawal of Judicial Assistance for Discovery from Private Arbitration

Is the judicial assistance intended for the benefit of ‘foreign or international tribunals’ under 28 USC § 1782 available for private arbitral tribunals? The Supreme Court of the United States says it is not because that assistance is intended only for tribunals vested with governmental authority and private arbitral tribunals lack such authority. This strained reading of section 1782 appears to have been reached to achieve policy objectives, not through rigorous analysis of the statutory provision itself. Although the end the Court sought to achieve is not without merit, the means chosen by the Court to achieve the same will give rise to, among others, the unintended consequence of curtailing international commercial arbitration in contravention of the federal policy favouring arbitration. This is so because the Court ignored the root cause of the problem it sought to solve, namely that section 1782 is available to ‘any interested person’ who is not required to be before any tribunal at all. Instead of trying to solve one problem with the wrong solution, the Court should have closed or Congress should close the loophole in section 1782 so that it may properly function and provide the judicial assistance as originally intended by Congress. Arbitration, arbitral tribunal, discovery, 28 USC § 1782, Hague Evidence Convention, Intel v. AMD, Intel factors