A judgment by which the ordinary court declares the claim inadmissible on the ground that jurisdiction lies with the arbitrators does not bind the arbitrators as to the legal existence and validity of the arbitration agreement, it being for the arbitrators to verify the regularity of their appointment, nor as to the ritual or informal nature of the arbitration.
The means of challenging an arbitral award must be identified on the basis of the nature of the act actually rendered by the arbitrators, and not of the arbitration as envisaged by the parties.
Under Article 816-bis of the Code of Civil Procedure, arbitrators have the power to regulate the conduct of the arbitral proceedings, subject to the obligation to uphold the adversarial principle and to afford the parties reasonable and equivalent opportunities to present their case; the fixing of peremptory time limits for the filing of pleadings and documents falls within the powers of case management and does not, in itself, constitute a violation of the right to be heard.
The sanction of nullity prescribed for an award containing contradictory provisions must be understood as requiring the contradiction to emerge between different parts of the operative section, or between the reasoning and the operative section; internal contradiction between different parts of the reasoning may be relevant only where it renders absolutely impossible the reconstruction of the logical and legal reasoning underlying the decision.