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ZF AUTOMOTIVE US, INC. v. LUXSHARE, LTD. 

Syllabus 

Lithuania expropriated investments.  Relevant here, the treaty estab-
lishes a procedure for resolving “any dispute between one Contracting 
Party and [an] investor of the other Contracting Party concerning” in-
vestments in the first Contracting Party’s territory, and offers parties 
four options for dispute resolution.  App. to Pet. for Cert. in No. 21– 
518, pp. 64a–65a.  The Fund chose an ad hoc arbitration in accordance 
with Arbitration Rules of the United Nations Commission on Interna-
tional Trade Law, with each party selecting one arbitrator and those 
two  choosing  a  third.    After  initiating  arbitration,  the  Fund  filed  a 
§1782  application  in  federal  court,  seeking  information  from  Simon 
Freakley, who was appointed as a temporary administrator of Snoras, 
and  AlixPartners,  LLP,  a  New  York-based  consulting  firm  where 
Freakley serves as CEO.  AlixPartners resisted discovery, arguing that
the ad hoc arbitration panel was not a “foreign or international tribu-
nal” under §1782 but instead a private adjudicative body.  The District 
Court  rejected  that  argument  and  granted  the  Fund’s  discovery  re-
quest.  The Second Circuit affirmed. 

Held: Only a governmental or intergovernmental adjudicative body con-
stitutes a “foreign or international tribunal” under 28 U. S. C. §1782, 
and the bodies at issue in these cases do not qualify.  Pp. 5–17.

(a) Section 1782(a) provides that a district court may order discovery 
“for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international tribunal.”  Stand-
ing  alone,  the  word  “tribunal”  can  be  used  either  as  a  synonym  for
“court,” in which case it carries a distinctively governmental flavor, or 
more broadly to refer to any adjudicatory body.  While a prior version 
of  §1782  covered  “any  judicial  proceeding”  in  “any  court  in  a  foreign 
country,” §1782 (1958 ed.), Congress later expanded the provision to 
cover proceedings in a “foreign or international tribunal.”  That shift 
created “ ‘the possibility of U. S. judicial assistance in connection with
administrative and quasi-judicial proceedings abroad.’ ”  Intel Corp. v. 
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., 542 U. S. 241, 258 (alterations omitted).
But while a “tribunal” thus need not be a formal “court,” read in con-
text—with  “tribunal”  attached  to  the  modifiers  “foreign  or  interna-
tional”—§1782’s phrase is best understood to refer to an adjudicative
body that exercises governmental authority.

“Foreign tribunal” more naturally refers to a tribunal belonging to a 
foreign  nation  than  to  a  tribunal  that  is  simply  located  in  a  foreign 
nation.  And for a tribunal to belong to a foreign nation, the tribunal 
must possess sovereign authority conferred by that nation.  This read-
ing of “foreign tribunal” is reinforced by the statutory defaults for dis-
covery  procedure  under  §1782,  which  permit  district  courts  to  pre-
scribe the practice and procedure, “which may be in whole or part the 
practice and procedure of the foreign country or the international tri-
bunal.”  §1782(a) (emphasis added).  The statute thus presumes that