Appealing Arbitration Decisions

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In the Hall Street decision in 2008, SCOTUS held that parties could not contractually enlarge Section 10 of the Federal Arbitration Act by agreeing that a court could vacate the arbitration award for reasons not found in that section.  This week, the Ninth Circuit held that parties also cannot contractually restrict Section 10 by providing…

The Federal Arbitration Act sets forth only four bases for vacating arbitration awards.  See 9 U.S.C. § 10 (a).    After SCOTUS’s 2008 decision in Hall Street, at least half of the circuit courts have concluded that those four bases are exclusive, de-legitimizing the creative bases that judges had developed over the years.  However, a…

The U.S. Supreme Court has been knocking out blockbuster arbitration opinions annually in recent years.  2010?  Stolt-Nielsen and Rent-a-Center.  2011?  Concepcion.  2012? CompuCredit (Okay, that does not qualify as a blockbuster.) 2013? AmEx and Sutter.  At this point, SCOTUS has accepted roughly half of the cases it will hear this year, and…

After reading more than 40 decisions about arbitration from state high courts, issued just in the past eight months, I have two bits of wisdom to share.  First, that is not the best way to spend your summer vacation, even for a devoted arbitration nerd.  And second, there are arbitration issues percolating in state courts…

In two decisions this week, courts consider whether arbitration awards can be vacated based on arbitrators’ decisions to exclude evidence.  In both cases, the courts affirm an arbitrator’s authority to make reasonable evidentiary decisions — excluding hearsay and denying tardy subpoena requests — as long as those decisions do not deny a party a fair…

In a decision that confirms arbitrators’ broad discretion to not only fashion remedies, but also fashion sanctions, the Minnesota Court of Appeals held that an arbitrator did not exceed his power by issuing a severe sanction: denying one party the right to defend against certain claims after finding that party had fabricated evidence relating to…

Within weeks of its issuance, SCOTUS’s Sutter decision is already making an impact on other cases. Both the Eleventh Circuit and the D.C. Court of Appeals cite Sutter repeatedly in recent decisions that refuse to vacate arbitration awards.  Of course, new decisions are not the only ones that reverberate: Concepcion, a 2011 decision, was…

The recent Sutter decision drives home repeatedly that a court may not vacate an arbitrator’s decision under the FAA just because a judge thinks the arbitrator reached the wrong result.  Justice Kagan said that under Section 10(a)(4) the court cannot second-guess the award, not even in the face of “grave error.”  Instead, the award must…

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Sutter today, unanimously holding that as long as the arbitrator bases a decision to allow or disallow class arbitration on the text of the parties’ agreement, her “construction holds, however good, bad, or ugly.”  Oxford Health Plans LLC v. Sutter, 569 U.S. ___ (June 10, 2013).  The …