Validity of Arbitration Agreement

In January of 2016, SCOTUS granted review of an arbitration case from Hawaii, but summarily vacated and remanded it without analysis.  (Unless you consider “Please read DIRECTV” substantive analysis.)  Here’s the risk of that course of action: Hawaii can refuse to change its mind.

Last month, in Narayan v. The Ritz-Carlton Development Co., 2017

The Federal Arbitration Act has been in effect for nearly 100 years (92, to be precise).  Nevertheless, the First Circuit found two issues of first impression to address this month.  In Oliveira v. New Prime, Inc., 2017 WL 1963461 (1st Cir. May 12, 2017), the court refused to compel arbitration of a class action

Just as I predicted, SCOTUS reversed the Kentucky Supreme Court’s decision in Kindred this morning.  The interesting piece, though, is that the seven member majority went out of its way to cut off some of the “on trend” methods that state courts have been using to avoid arbitration clauses.

The Kentucky decision can be

It is not uncommon for lenders to exempt small claims actions from their arbitration provisions. The question confronted by the Court of Appeals of Maryland in a recent case was: when a lender opts for small claims court, does that waive any later right to enforce the arbitration clause?  The court’s answer was yes, if

Demonstrating just how difficult it can be to separate questions about the “formation” of an arbitration agreement from the “validity” of that agreement, the Fifth Circuit found this month that when an argument was applied to two of the parties’ three agreements, it related to their formation, but when the same argument was applied to

Now that Justice Gorsuch is confirmed and can take the open seat on the Supreme Court, maybe SCOTUS can move forward on the cases about whether employers can make employees waive their right to class actions in an arbitration agreement.  (Btw, here’s a nice SCOTUSblog piece on Gorsuch’s arbitration decisions.)  In the meantime, California’s

In the past week, the Third Circuit has issued two important decisions on the formation of arbitration agreements.  (Sing it Beyoncé! “Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation.”)  In one, a class action was allowed to proceed in court because the defendant did not obtain explicit enough agreement to the arbitration, and in another an

Two federal circuit courts of appeals have recently found that documents Samsung included in boxes with consumer products did not effectively create an arbitration agreement.   In both cases, the documents had titles indicating they related to safety and warranty information, and therefore were ruled insufficient to put consumers on notice of any obligation to arbitrate.

While the Supreme Court has put off hearing a more contentious arbitration case until the fall (presumably in hopes that it will have nine justices by then), tomorrow it will hear the nursing home arbitration case from Kentucky.  I look forward to listening to the questions and trying to figure out why the Justices granted