In the course of its decision in GBF Industria de Gusa S/A v. AMCI Holdings, 850 F.3d 58 (2d Cir. 2017), cert. den., 138 S.Ct. 557 (2017), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit referred to the “confusion” that sometimes accompanies applications to U.S. district courts to reduce arbitration awards to judgment. It went on to provide the following guidance for the avoidance of such confusion in the future:

… we encourage litigants and district courts alike to take care to specify explicitly the type of arbitral award the district court is evaluating (domestic, nondomestic, or foreign), whether the district court is sitting in primary or secondary jurisdiction, and, accordingly, whether the action seeks confirmation of a domestic or nondomestic arbitral award under the district court’s primary jurisdiction or enforcement of a foreign arbitral award under its secondary jurisdiction.

In this passage, the Second Circuit makes three sets of distinctions with respect to applications to U.S. courts to reduce arbitration awards to judgment, depending on: (1) the type of award that is the subject of the application (whether it is “foreign,” ”nondomestic,” or “domestic”); (2) the appropriate terminology in which the relief sought by that application should be expressed (whether, on the one hand, a court should be requested to “confirm” an award or, on the other, to “enforce” it); and (3) the juridical posture of the U.S. court considering that application (whether it is sitting as a court of “primary” or “secondary” jurisdiction). In making and explaining these various distinctions, it is interesting to note that the Second Circuit drew heavily from the draft Restatement of the Law (Third) The U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration (the Draft Restatement), a current project of the American Law Institute, the Chief Reporter of which is Prof. George A. Bermann of the Columbia Law School.