A resource for litigators, in-house counsel, and arbitrators
This is my 290th post at ArbitrationNation and today I celebrate six years of blogging. Woo hoo — that’s longer than most celebrity marriages! In honor of the occasion, here are updates on six of the hottest issues in arbitration law so far this year.
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In National Labor Relations Board v. Alternative Entertainment, Inc., No. 16-1385, 2017 WL 2297620 (6th Cir. May 26, 2017), the Sixth Circuit joined the Seventh and Ninth Circuits in upholding the NLRB’s decision that barring an employee from pursuing class action or collective claims violates the NLRA. Already lined up on the other side…
Of all the federal circuit courts, I was not expecting the 7th Circuit to venture out on a limb to support the NLRB’s interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as precluding class arbitration waivers. After all, the 7th Circuit gets affirmed more than other circuit courts by SCOTUS, earning it a reputation for…
Some arbitration topics just never die. This post strings together new cases on three of those topics: 1) whether arbitration agreements that call for the now-defunct National Arbitration Forum (NAF) are enforceable; 2) formation fights in nursing home agreements; and 3) the continuing fight between the NLRB and the courts over class action waivers in…
Did you know that 87% of experienced arbitrators report *always* trying to follow applicable law in rendering an award? That will come as a surprise to many critics who like to complain that arbitrators do not adhere to established law.
The statistic comes from a survey that Prof. Thomas Stipanowich of Pepperdine University School of…
SCOTUS announced today that it would not review the Third Circuit’s decision in Strine v. Delaware Coalition for Open Government, Inc, holding 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. Therefore, that decision is final and Delaware will now…
After three federal circuits had already refused to defer to the NLRB’s decision in D.R. Horton, it is not surprising that the Fifth Circuit yesterday overruled the NLRB’s critical holding: that precluding class arbitrations is a violation of federal labor law. D.R. Horton, Inc. v. Nat’l Labor Relations Bd., __ F.3d __, 2013…
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…
A reasonable person may have thought that the Supreme Court effectively killed off class arbitrations with its decisions in Stolt-Nielsen and Concepcion, but at least two government agencies have recently made decisions that ensure financial consumers and employees can bring classwide claims in some arbitrations.
FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, regulates all securities…