A resource for litigators, in-house counsel, and arbitrators
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.
The Supreme Court of Mississippi issued a new opinion that sheds light on a topic that doesn’t come up often: when can an arbitration award be modified due to miscalculation? D.W. Caldwell, Inc. v. W.G. Yates & Sons Construction Co., 2018 WL 2146355 (Miss. May 10, 2018).
The context for the case was a…
Today the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari in another case involving the Federal Arbitration Act. The case, Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela, comes from the Ninth Circuit and raises a variation of the question from Sutter: how clear does an arbitration agreement need to be to show the parties authorized…
One question I get frequently is whether a party can protect the status quo by seeking a court injunction, even if there is an arbitration agreement in place. Usually, I point them back to this post from 2011 (with the caveat that the AAA rules now authorize arbitrators to grant emergency relief, without any…
The last post focused on three recent state appellate court decisions that refused to compel arbitration or vacated an award, and this follow-up post focuses on seven recent cases that are friendly to arbitration.
My favorite is from Montana. Although none of its arbitration decisions have been addressed by SCOTUS, Montana decided to preempt any…
The focus today is recent state appellate court decisions on arbitration. Because there are an awful lot of them, I am going to divide them roughly into those that are pro arbitration, and those that are hostile to arbitration. This post focuses on the three relatively hostile cases (with the friendly cases coming in a…
A new Seventh Circuit case answers the age-old question: if a fourteen-year-old swipes her mom’s credit card to complete a smoothie purchase at the mall, is she bound to the credit card agreement?
The case, A.D. v. Credit One Bank, N.A., __ F.3d __, 2018 WL 1414907 (Mar. 22. 2018), addressed whether the lead…
Two different panels of the Second Circuit issued opinions about class arbitration on the same day last week. One creates a circuit split over how specific parties must be to delegate the availability of class arbitration to arbitrators, and the second addresses when bankruptcy law can preempt the federal arbitration act.
In Wells Fargo Advisors…
Sometimes current events provide an occasion perfect storm to educate about arbitration basics. This is one of those occasions.
Here are questions that friends and colleagues storming mad people have asked me in the past day or so, with my best answers:
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Despite how often I talk about whack-a-mole and the tug-of-war between the state courts and SCOTUS on arbitration, the truth is that the majority of state supreme courts follow SCOTUS’s arbitration precedent (whether holding their noses or not, we don’t know). Recent weeks have given us multiple of those pro-arbitration state court decisions to highlight…
A recent decision from the 10th Circuit shows there is a whole new way to invalidate an arbitration agreement. In Citizen Potawatomi Nation v. Oklahoma, 2018 WL 718606 (10th Cir. Feb. 6, 2018), the court found the arbitration agreement unenforceable because the parties provided for de novo review of any arbitration award in federal court,…