Definition
A submission bond is the written instrument by which parties to a dispute formally agree to submit their controversy to arbitration and bind themselves to comply with the arbitrator's award. It serves a dual function: it is simultaneously the agreement to arbitrate and the undertaking to honor the outcome. By executing a submission bond, each party pledges that they will not later seek to avoid an unfavorable award simply by refusing to perform.
The bond typically identifies the parties, describes the dispute being submitted, names the arbitrator or establishes how one will be selected, and contains the binding pledge — the surety element — that the parties will abide by whatever the arbitrator decides. In this sense it is both a contract and a bond in the classical legal sense: an obligation backed by a penalty for non-compliance.
Common Confusion
SUBMISSION BOND vs. SUBMISSION AGREEMENT: Modern arbitration practice tends to use the term "submission agreement" or simply "submission" for the document memorializing an agreement to arbitrate an existing dispute. The submission bond is the older form, incorporating the suretyship pledge directly into the submission document. A researcher who encounters "submission" alone in historical sources should check whether a bond was also executed, as the two were sometimes treated as separate instruments — the submission defining the scope of arbitration, the bond providing the enforcement mechanism.
SUBMISSION BOND vs. ARBITRATION CLAUSE: An arbitration clause in a contract is prospective — it commits the parties to arbitrate future disputes. A submission bond is retrospective — it is executed after a dispute has arisen and submits that specific controversy. Historical sources sometimes blur this distinction, but it is significant for research purposes because submission bonds typically appear in the record only after litigation or a dispute was already underway.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in pre-twentieth-century legal sources. Modern arbitration practice has largely displaced the submission bond with statutory frameworks — the Federal Arbitration Act and its state equivalents — that make arbitration agreements enforceable without requiring the suretyship formality of a bond. A researcher searching nineteenth-century court records, equity pleadings, or common law arbitration materials will encounter submission bonds frequently; a researcher working with post-1925 materials will rarely see the term except in historical analysis or older form books.
The archival trap is this: because "submission bond" combines two legal concepts — submission (the agreement to arbitrate) and bond (the suretyship pledge) — older indexes may file related documents under either heading. Check both when searching historical court records or treatise indexes.
Jurisdictional variation matters in historical research. English common law courts treated submission bonds with some skepticism, as agreements to oust the courts of jurisdiction. American equity courts were more receptive, and state statutory developments varied considerably. A submission bond enforceable in one jurisdiction's courts might not have been enforceable in another's without statutory authorization.
Researchers should also note that the enforceability of the underlying award — not just the bond — was the persistent litigation question. Courts frequently heard challenges to awards made under submission bonds on grounds that the arbitrators exceeded their authority, that the submission was too vague to enforce, or that the bond was void for want of consideration. These cases are a rich source for understanding early American arbitration doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement on the core definition, both citing the bond as the instrument by which parties agree to submit a controversy and bind themselves to the award. Black's attributes the language to Brown — a reference to the Brown treatise on arbitration and award — while Bouvier's cross-references his own entry on SUBMISSION, suggesting he treated the bond as derivative of the broader submission doctrine rather than an independent instrument.
Neither historical source addresses the question of penalty: classical bonds carried a penal sum — a stated monetary penalty payable upon breach — and it is likely that submission bonds in formal use did as well, though neither dictionary makes this explicit. Researchers working with actual instruments should look for a penal sum clause as a marker of formal bond structure, as opposed to a simple agreement to arbitrate.
Neither dictionary addresses the displacement of submission bonds by statutory arbitration frameworks, which was still in its early stages when both works were in active use. Later editions of Black's reflect the shift, but the entry for submission bond becomes thinner as the instrument fell out of common use.
Jurisdictional Note
The submission bond as a formal instrument was a creature of common law practice and appears most frequently in jurisdictions that followed English arbitration procedure before comprehensive arbitration statutes were enacted. In the United States, the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 and subsequent state arbitration acts made written arbitration agreements directly enforceable without requiring bond formalities, effectively rendering the submission bond obsolete in most American practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
contracts_168: Suretyship -- Performance Bonds and Payment Bonds (Construction Context) (The Law Mind Contracts & Commercial Law Encyclopedia) — for background on bond mechanics and the suretyship pledge underlying formal bond instruments.