Liz Kramer

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Liz Kramer current serves as Minnesota's Solicitor General.  Previously, she was a partner at Stinson Leonard Street and the founder of the award-winning blog, ArbitrationNation.

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California is changing its tune.  Although previously known for decisions that flouted federal arbitration law, its decision yesterday in Sanchez shows the current California Supreme Court will abide by SCOTUS’s interpretation of the FAA.  After a trial court and intermediate appellate court had ruled that the arbitration clause in a consumer contract was unconscionable, the…

Parties who ask a court to compel arbitration of all the plaintiff’s claims have a decision to make: should they ask the court to stay the claims or dismiss them (if it finds them arbitrable)?   After noting that the federal courts of appeal are “about evenly divided” on that question, the Second Circuit held that…

One way to challenge the very existence of an agreement to arbitrate is to say that the parties’ contract said nothing about arbitration and did not validly incorporate any other document calling for arbitration.  Oklahoma and Alabama have recently come out at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what kind of notice must…

A recent report showed that less than half of arbitration agreements in the consumer financial arena include delegation clauses in their arbitration agreements.  Two recent decisions from state high courts suggest that is a wise decision because courts do not like to enforce delegation clauses. (Reminder: a delegation clause gives the arbitrator explicit authority to…

Three federal appellate courts recently affirmed lower courts’ refusal to compel arbitration.  These cases show that the federal policy favoring arbitration is not absolute – the parties must have agreed to arbitrate the claims at issue and the defendant cannot have waived its right to arbitrate by engaging in significant discovery and motion practice.

In…

Three years ago, this blog catalogued where all the federal circuits stood on the issue of whether an arbitration award that “manifestly disregarded the law” could be vacated under the Federal Arbitration Act, as that is not one of the four bases for vacatur listed in Section 10.  There was a circuit split then, and…

Hawaii issued a bold arbitration decision this month. It applied its state contract law to conclude that the parties did not form a clear arbitration agreement, but even if they did, it was unconscionable because it prohibited both discovery and punitive damages.  Narayan v. The Ritz-Carlton Dev. Co., Inc., __ P.3d __, 2015 WL…

Arbitration has a brand recognition problem. Not enough people know what it is.

The recent CFPB report summarized studies showing that even among consumers who know they have an arbitration clause, the majority do not realize they cannot go to court or have their claims decided by a jury. One explanation is that those consumers…

The Supreme Court of Missouri has issued two significant arbitration decisions in recent weeks, showing its willingness to sever any aspects of an arbitration agreement that it finds unconscionable (while enforcing the overall obligation to arbitrate).

First, in a contentious decision, the Supreme Court of Missouri found that a former employee of the St. Louis…