A resource for litigators, in-house counsel, and arbitrators
No haunted house can scare general counsel as much as an opinion invalidating their company’s arbitration clause and thereby allowing a class action to proceed. So, here is a Halloween tale for all to keep in mind.
Ralphs Grocery Company hired Zenia Chavarria to work in the deli of one of its grocery stores. Ms.…
The Third Circuit ruled last week that Delaware’s Chancery Court could not offer its judges’ services as neutral arbitrators in its courtrooms, unless those arbitrations were open to the public.
In 2009, the Delaware courts decided to provide arbitration. The state amended its laws to create an arbitration process that was only open to disputes…
Now that we know the Supreme Court is not going to be addressing non-signatories’ ability to compel arbitration this term (at least not in the Toyota case), we can take a moment to look at what lower courts are doing with that issue. In short, the trend is for courts to clarify that it…
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…
You hear more about Lena Dunham than you expect, given the audience for “Girls”, right? (Read this article for more.) The same is true, or should be true, for the contract defense of illusoriness. After decades of disuse, it is popping up more and more often as a defense to the enforcement of arbitration clauses…
In January of this year, the Eighth Circuit was the first federal appellate court to refuse to adopt the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling on class action waivers in employment contracts. (The previous year, in D.R. Horton, the NLRB declared it a violation of federal labor law for employers to require employees to waive their…
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…
Put this post in the “I called it” category.
On June 12, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declared in Feeney that class arbitration waivers are invalid under Massachusetts law if plaintiffs cannot effectively pursue their claims in individual arbitration. On June 20, the U.S. Supreme Court decided American Express, holding that arbitration agreements must…
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…
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…