Liz has written before about the ways that state courts sometimes try to resist SCOTUS’s love affair with arbitration.  Resistance can come in many and varying forms, some more subtle than others.

One persistent source of confusion in arbitration law, and thus a locus for resistance, centers on delegation clauses. As a quick refresher, in

One of the most confounding doctrines in federal arbitration jurisprudence is the severability doctrine.  The U.S. Supreme Court has held, since Prima Paint in 1967, that courts must enforce arbitration clauses within contracts, even if the entire contract is invalid or unenforceable.  (Most non-arbitration geeks don’t believe me when I tell them that’s the law.) 

Class action arbitration continues to be a hot topic among the federal appellate courts this summer.

The 8th Circuit followed the lead of other circuit courts, finding that courts, not arbitrators, presumptively decide whether the parties’ arbitration agreement allows for class arbitration. Catamaran Corporation v. Towncrest Pharmacy, 2017 WL 3197622 (July 28,

Three state supreme courts tackled arbitration law in recent weeks: Alabama, North Carolina, and Rhode Island.  Rhode Island reversed a construction arbitration award because it disagreed with the arbitrator’s analysis.  North Carolina found that an arbitration agreement in a doctor-patient setting was unenforceable as a breach of the doctor’s fiduciary duty.  And Alabama strictly enforced

In a decision that appears intentionally controversial, the Supreme Court of New Jersey yesterday refused to enforce the delegation clause in a for-profit college’s enrollment agreement in a 5-1 opinion.  Morgan v. Sanford Brown Institute, 2016 WL 3248016 (N.J. June 14, 2016).  Although the delegation clause had never been specifically challenged by the plaintiffs, as

Showing it will soldier on without Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court granted cert, vacated, and remanded an arbitration decision from West Virginia yesterday.  Because this is the exact same treatment the Court gave a case from Hawaii’s highest court in January (and the same treatment I predicted, ahem), it suggests SCOTUS is trying to go

A new case from the Sixth Circuit addresses whether accountants who are resolving a dispute about payments made under an agreement can also make legal determinations about the same agreement. In a 2-1 decision, the Sixth Circuit held that the scope of the dispute clause is broad enough to allow the accountants to resolve contract