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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A lot of interesting arbitration law was made this year, on topics from validity to vacatur, but the banner issue was arbitrator authority.  SCOTUS announced that theme for the year with its BG Group decision in March and federal and state courts around the country ran with it.  [Warning: this post is a doozy.  Get…

Did you know that 87% of experienced arbitrators report *always* trying to follow applicable law in rendering an award?  That will come as a surprise to many critics who like to complain that arbitrators do not adhere to established law.

The statistic comes from a survey that Prof. Thomas Stipanowich of Pepperdine University School of…

A few months ago, the Ninth Circuit found that the arbitration agreement in Barnes & Noble’s website was not enforceable.  This week, the Ninth Circuit found that the arbitration agreement Sirius XM Radio relied upon was not enforceable because the user did not know he had any agreement with Sirius XM, let alone an arbitration…

The Supreme Court of Hawai’i concluded last week that it is fundamentally unfair to allow one party to an arbitration agreement to unilaterally select the arbitral forum. Nishimura v. Gentry Homes, Ltd., __ P.3d__, 2014 WL 5503393 (Haw. Oct. 31, 2014).  The parties can either jointly agree to a forum, or the court will…

In three cases in recent months, courts have found that plaintiffs who did not sign an arbitration agreement (non-signatories) are not obligated to arbitrate.  In all three cases, a key issue was that the plaintiff’s claims in court did not rely on the contract containing the arbitration clause.

In the most interesting and widely applicable …

Two parties recently convinced federal circuit courts that the language of their arbitration agreements was not sufficient to compel arbitration of their disputes. Both cases turned on how courts “harmonize” language from different parts of an agreement or from multiple agreements.

The decision from the Eighth Circuit was a pretty easy one. The parties’ contract…

The Minnesota Supreme Court today unanimously confirmed an arbitration award of over $600 million in punitive sanctions. Seagate Technology, LLC v. Western Digital Corp., (Minn. Oct. 8, 2014).  Although the appellant argued the arbitrator exceeded his authority by severely sanctioning appellant for fabricating evidence, the court concluded that the parties’ agreement gave the arbitrator power…