A resource for litigators, in-house counsel, and arbitrators
Welcome back to ArbitrationNation after a pandemic and protests hiatus. I hope that you and your families are safe and that you’re confronting and coping with the injustices of our world.
I’m glad to have a good reason to write about arbitration again. I’ve got a boatload of arbitration developments and cases to catch up…
Delegation provisions are a hot topic this year! This week, we’re going to look at two more circuit court decisions centering on delegations and finding ways around them.
Just to set the stage, though, I’ve got to put a little egg on my own face. To quote myself from back in June: “it’s almost…
Happy August! What’s a better way to start the month than thinking about class arbitrability! Again. Ugh.
Trust me, I would much rather consider so many other exciting arbitration issues, but this one seems to be occupying a lot of court attention, so I’d be remiss not to report on it.
Since my last update,…
So, remember when we talked about Just How Small the Bullseye Is for Challenging a Delegation Clause a few weeks ago? Apparently, the target is small but not necessarily as unhittable as I suggested.
You might recall that in that earlier post we were looking at a Missouri Supreme Court decision, State Ex Rel. Newberry …
Happy summer! It’s been far too long since my last update, but rest assured I have been thinking a lot about arbitration. In fact, I’m currently teaching a summer course at Queen Mary University of London’s International School of Arbitration, which is a ton of fun.
My teaching, in fact, partly inspired this post. Teaching…
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…
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…
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…
Just over a year has passed since the U.S. Supreme Court applied the severability doctrine in Rent-A-Center, West Inc. v. Jackson, 130 S. Ct. 2772 (2010), in such a way that Justice Stevens and three others dissented, raising the specter of “infinite layers of severability” and a parade of arbitrability horribles. A review of…