Federal Arbitration Act

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The Eleventh Circuit has a lesson for future litigants: the presence of a repeat player is not enough to show the evident partiality needed to vacate an arbitration award under the Federal Arbitration Act.

In  Johnson v. Directory Assistants, Inc., __ F.3d __, 2015 WL 4939578 (11th Cir. Aug. 20, 2015), an advertising company…

Parties who ask a court to compel arbitration of all the plaintiff’s claims have a decision to make: should they ask the court to stay the claims or dismiss them (if it finds them arbitrable)?   After noting that the federal courts of appeal are “about evenly divided” on that question, the Second Circuit held that…

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…

Three years ago, this blog catalogued where all the federal circuits stood on the issue of whether an arbitration award that “manifestly disregarded the law” could be vacated under the Federal Arbitration Act, as that is not one of the four bases for vacatur listed in Section 10.  There was a circuit split then, and…

Hawaii issued a bold arbitration decision this month. It applied its state contract law to conclude that the parties did not form a clear arbitration agreement, but even if they did, it was unconscionable because it prohibited both discovery and punitive damages.  Narayan v. The Ritz-Carlton Dev. Co., Inc., __ P.3d __, 2015 WL…

The Supreme Court of Missouri has issued two significant arbitration decisions in recent weeks, showing its willingness to sever any aspects of an arbitration agreement that it finds unconscionable (while enforcing the overall obligation to arbitrate).

First, in a contentious decision, the Supreme Court of Missouri found that a former employee of the St. Louis…

Today I present a collection of recent state and federal appellate court decisions that vacate or un-vacate arbitration awards. The seven opinions below emphasize how difficult it is to prove that an arbitrator exceeded his or her power and suggest that the surest way to vacate an arbitration award is still by presenting evidence that…