POSTSCRIPT: UPDATING CALIFORNIA’S INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION CODE

Written by Daniel M. Kolkey

In the September 2023 issue of California Litigation, I wrote about the need to update California’s international commercial arbitration code, which, with one discrete exception, had not been amended for 35 years. (See Kolkey, The Need to Update California’s International Arbitration Code (Sept. 2023) 36:2 Cal. Litigation 38.)

As that article reported, Assembly Bill No. 615 had been introduced in the Legislature in February 2023, in order to update California’s international commercial arbitration code, which had been enacted in 1988 and was based on the Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration adopted by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). However, although the UNCITRAL Model Law had been subsequently updated, California’s law had not.

Based on those subsequent amendments to the UNCITRAL Model Law, Assembly Bill No. 615 promised to: (a) broaden what constituted a written international arbitration agreement to address the "evolving practice in international trade," by which technologies are increasingly used in drafting arbitration agreements; (b) provide standards and procedures for seeking and obtaining interim measures of protection from an arbitral tribunal, given that such measures are increasingly relied upon in the practice of international arbitration; (c) authorize the arbitral tribunal to modify, suspend, or terminate an interim measure of protection; and (d) provide grounds for the courts to enforce, or refuse to enforce, an interim measure of protection, among other things.