Joinder of the third party arbitration proceedings

: Lessons learnt from the United Kingdom

Abstract

This thesis explores the essential legal factors of joining the third party to arbitral proceedings to provide guidance to legislators and arbitration agreement parties for effective and efficient proceedings. It is widely accepted that the parties’ consent to an arbitration agreement is essential factor. If disputed, two factors may be invoked to permit third party arbitration involvement: the third party being signatory to the arbitration agreement; or the application of third party joinder theories. Noticeably, the requirement of the third party signature provided either by a third party or a genuine party might merely give a supervisory authority, be fraudulent, or be granted under duress, which undermines the argument that the mere existence of a signature is an assertive factor support the third party joinder to the arbitral proceedings. Joining third parties to an arbitration may implicate different theories such as (a) Agency; (b) Mandate Apparent Authority; (c) Equitable Estoppel; (d) Alter Ego and Veil Piercing; (e) Implied Consent; (f) Group of Companies’ Doctrine (here in after GoCD); (h) Subrogation; (i) Universal Succession; (j) Third-party Beneficiaries; (k) Guarantor; (l) Incorporation by Reference; (m) Assignment and Novation; (n) Corporate Officer; (o) Assumption; and (p) Ratification. This work critically apprises some of the well-known theories of third party arbitration from a comparative law perspective such as the Go CD to indicate that their existence is not a stable factor for third party involvement in arbitral proceedings due to national legislative variations. To achieve the study aim, the rules of third party joinder in courts and arbitration proceedings were critically assessed under both UK and Jordanian national legislation and international laws. The author conducted a doctrinal research and empirical qualitative research approaches, their objectives tailored to develop a case study in Jordan. Interviews were conducted with lawyers, judges, academics, and arbitration practitioners to analyse their opinions and demonstrate the main factors in joining a third party to arbitral proceedings and judicial practices. The findings demonstrate that third party arbitration is not functioning well in Jordan due to a lack of third party arbitration rules at the national level, thus the lessons learnt from the UK arbitral regime for the Jordanian context are analysed in depth.

Date of Award	Apr 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Coventry University
Supervisor	Margaret Liu (Supervisor), Neil Renwick (Supervisor) & Umut Turksen (Supervisor)