"clear and unmistakable"

The interplay of the separability doctrine and delegation clauses can create a bullseye that only Hawkeye, the OG Avenger with a bow, might have a prayer of hitting.  The Missouri Supreme Court provided a nice reminder about this problem in a recent case, State Ex Rel. Newberry v. Jackson, 2019 WL 2181859 (May 21,

Usually the plaintiffs in a class action want to stay out of arbitration, but in the recent case of JPAY v. Kobel, 2018 WL 4472207 (11th Cir. Sept. 19, 2018), it was the class representatives who were fighting for arbitration.  In particular, they wanted the arbitrator to decide whether they could have a class

Today’s post concerns a perennially hot topic: class actions.  In particular, do courts decide whether an arbitration agreement allows for class actions?  Or do arbitrators?  (Because, it turns out, there are actually some corporations who have not inserted class action waivers in their consumer contracts.)  To date, four circuit courts have held that class arbitrability

Two different panels of the Second Circuit issued opinions about class arbitration on the same day last week.  One creates a circuit split over how specific parties must be to delegate the availability of class arbitration to arbitrators, and the second addresses when bankruptcy law can preempt the federal arbitration act.

In Wells Fargo Advisors

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

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,

Lots of interesting arbitration law has been made already in 2016, so here is a roundup from the first four weeks of the year. As a teaser, courts have breathed life into the effective vindication doctrine, found arbitrators cannot determine the availability of class actions, and found state laws not preempted.  More surprisingly, state courts

A recent report showed that less than half of arbitration agreements in the consumer financial arena include delegation clauses in their arbitration agreements.  Two recent decisions from state high courts suggest that is a wise decision because courts do not like to enforce delegation clauses. (Reminder: a delegation clause gives the arbitrator explicit authority to

To date, courts have largely limited the impact of the Rent-A-Center decision to arbitration agreements with explicit delegation clauses. But, what if Rent-A-Center applied to every single arbitration agreement that mentioned the AAA rules?  That is a very real possibility, and one which would send almost all arbitrability disputes to arbitrators.

The ­Rent-A-Center decision used