There is in English arbitral law an inescapable anomaly. The parties to an arbitration agreement are contracting parties to a legal contract. Their contract creates obligations and establishes rights. In the event of a breach the innocent contractor may seek any one of the range of traditional contract remedies.1 Yet there is no fundamental obligation to discharge the essential purpose of an arbitration agreement—which is to arbitrate. In the ultimate this is a question of judicial discretion and not of contractual obligation or right. Notwithstanding a prior agreement to arbitrate a party thereto may nonetheless ignore the agreement and take his grievance to a court of law.2 Such a step does not amount to a breach of the arbitration agreement nor can it be restrained by an injunction.3 The most an objecting party can do is to endeavour to persuade the court to stay the proceedings.4 Only if the application is successful is the delinquent party compelled to arbitrate, but here again the compulsion is indirect and specific performance will not issue.5 In the kind of scenario here depicted, with the absence of a mutual voluntary submission, the ultimate effect of an arbitration agreement is determined not by its status as a species of legal contract but by judicial discretion. This leads to the conclusion that although an arbitration agreement is patently a legal contract it is nonetheless a special and peculiar kind of contract. One English judge has well captured this special and peculiar quality in his description of an arbitration agreement as a contract of “imperfect obligation”.6

The experience of English court proceedings being brought in disregard of a previously agreed arbitration agreement is a familiar phenomenon. Equally familiar are the possible remedies. By virtue of the Arbitration Act 1950, s. 4(1) and the Arbitration Act 1975, s. 1, the English courts enjoy a statutory jurisdiction to stay the proceedings brought. There also survives an inherent jurisdiction to direct a stay but