While I was busy blogging out listicles and “think pieces” last month, my stack of unread arbitration cases grew exponentially. August was apparently a very busy month for publishing arbitration opinions. Maybe most surprisingly, the federal appellate courts vacated three arbitration awards in recent weeks. So I will start there, and end with
Arbitration case law did not break any new ground in 2015. Instead, a larger sector of the public became aware of the ground already broken in 2011 and 2013, as well as how common arbitration is in professional sports.
Let’s review some of the attention-grabbing arbitration headlines of 2015. There was:
The Supreme Court of Missouri has issued two significant arbitration decisions in recent weeks, showing its willingness to sever any aspects of an arbitration agreement that it finds unconscionable (while enforcing the overall obligation to arbitrate).
First, in a contentious decision, the Supreme Court of Missouri found that a former employee of the St. Louis
A federal judge in Minnesota today vacated the arbitration award that confirmed the NFL’s discipline of Adrian Peterson. You can read the decision here. The judge found two separate bases for vacating the award: 1) the award failed to “draw its essence” from the parties’ Collective Bargaining Agreement; and 2) the arbitrator exceeded his