Scope of Arbitration Agreement

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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…

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…

What happens when state courts disagree with SCOTUS’s interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act?  They resist, and they have a thousand different ways of doing so.  The Mississippi Supreme Court demonstrated one way to resist recently in Pedigo v. Robertson, Rent-A-Center, Inc., 2017 WL 4838243 (Miss. Oct. 26, 2017). (I neglected to mention the…

The “Summer of Arbitration” draws to a close tomorrow, if you can believe it.  (On the first day of fall, it is supposed to be 91 degrees in Minnesota.  Yikes.)  But before I close that chapter, let’s take a look at a theme that emerged in these last weeks: non-signatories losing their attempts to compel…

In two recent decisions, the Alabama Supreme Court made clear that if an arbitration clause specifies it only applies to disputes between the two parties who sign the clause, that will be strictly enforced.  No third party can enforce the arbitration agreement.

In Nissan N. Am. v. Scott, 2017 WL 3446129 (Ala. Aug. 11,…

Just three weeks into the year and already my pile of arbitration cases is a skyscraper! So, I will cover a lot of ground in this update.

First, the headline. Kimberly, Kourtney, and Khloe Kardashian moved to compel arbitration, although they were not signatories to the arbitration agreement.  Kroma Makeup EU v. Boldface Licensing +…

While regular people count down the days to summer blockbusters that come in the form of high-paid actors fighting aliens or robots, I prefer my summer blockbusters in the form of arbitration opinions that have been months in the making (maybe finally released because the clerks are about to turn over?). Today, I report on…