Reconstructing the Seat of Arbitration: Comparative Jurisprudence and a Quantitative Analysis of Enforcement under the New York Convention

Abstract

The arbitral seat remains the juridical anchor of international arbitration, fixing the lex arbitri, the supervisory court, and the domestic-versus-foreign classification of an award under the New York Convention. Yet the seat's territorial premise has come under sustained pressure from the French delocalisation tradition, from divergent comparative jurisprudence in England, the United States, and Germany, and, more recently, from blockchain-based decentralised arbitration platforms that operate without any geographical nexus at all. This article develops a doctrinal account of that pressure, updated to reflect the England Arbitration Act 2025 (in force 1 August 2025), the UK Supreme Court's 2024 decision in UniCredit Bank GmbH v RusChemAlliance LLC, and France's 2025 arbitration-law reform proposal, before complementing the doctrinal analysis with an original quantitative component. Because no consolidated empirical dataset exists tracking enforcement outcomes across seats, the article constructs a hypothetical, simulated dataset of eighty illustrative arbitration-enforcement scenarios, calibrated to relationships the doctrinal literature hypothesises, and subjects it to Pearson correlation and multiple ordinary-least-squares regression analysis. The results presented throughout as an illustrative simulation rather than an empirical finding show annulment at the seat and the seat's underlying legal-certainty index as the strongest predictors of both enforcement success and enforcement speed, while the seat's territorial-versus-delocalised philosophical orientation, considered alone, shows no significant independent effect once these and other factors are controlled for. The article argues this pattern is consistent with, and helps sharpen, the doctrinal claim that the "battle of seats" between territorial and delocalised theory is less consequential in practice than the surrounding institutional architecture Model Law adoption, institutional administration, and judicial predictability surrounding whichever seat is chosen, and closes with a four-step framework for reconstructing the seat around this insight.