On March 17, 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in Application of the Republic of Kazakhstan v. Biedermann International,1 joined the Second Circuit in ruling that the assistance provided for in Section 1782 of Title 28 is not available to private international tribunals.

Its opinion follows largely the reasoning employed by the Second Circuit and notes that my 1965 Columbia Law Review article, although stating that the term “ ‘tribunal’ embraces all bodies exercising adjudicatory powers, and includes . . . administrative and arbitral tribunals,” does not discuss specifically commercial arbitrations, which it describes as a “then-novel arena.”2