§ 1297.13.Conditions Making Agreement International

This is the gateway test for the whole title: unless an agreement qualifies as international under this section, this title does not apply to it, and the dispute follows the ordinary domestic arbitration statute instead. Four independent paths lead to that qualification, and meeting any one of them is enough.

The most direct path looks at the parties themselves: if they had their places of business in different states when they made the agreement, it is international. A second path looks past the parties to the transaction's geography, asking whether the arbitration's specified place, the place where a substantial part of the parties' obligations is to be performed, or the place most closely connected to the dispute's subject matter sits outside the state where the parties do business. The remaining two paths look at the substance of the dispute rather than location: an agreement is international if the parties expressly agreed its subject matter relates to commercial interests in more than one state, or if that multi-state connection exists in fact even without an express agreement about it.