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

The Fifth Circuit just deepened (and confused) a Circuit split over the question of who decides whether an arbitration agreement permits class proceedings.  See 20/20 Communications, Incorporated v. Crawford, 2019 WL 3281412 (5th Cir. July 22, 2019).

Liz has written about the split herehere, and here.  (You might also recall

I have saved up six opinions that considered whether to vacate an arbitration award over the summer.*  Only one of those opinions vacated the award; the other five confirmed.  To get a flavor of what types of arguments are winning and losing motions to vacate, here is a summary of those six.

Vacated

The lone

The Fifth Circuit un-vacated an arbitration award last week, holding the district court had wrongly concluded that the court was the proper decision-maker on contract formation.  Although courts are presumptively authorized to decide whether an arbitration agreement exists, the Fifth Circuit found the parties altered that presumption by “submitting, briefing, and generally disputing that issue

Let’s say your arbitration agreement calls for arbitration administered by JAMS under JAMS rules, but the arbitrator is independent and applies AAA rules, over one party’s objection.  A new decision from the Fifth Circuit says that is enough to vacate the resulting award.

In Poolre Insurance Corp. v. Organizational Strategies, Inc., __ F.3d__, 2015 WL

“When an arbitration goes an opponent’s way on the basis of questionable contract interpretation, parties often seek refuge in [Section] 10(a)(4).  But the Supreme Court has made clear that district courts’ review of arbitrators’ awards under [that Section] is limited to the ‘sole question… of whether the arbitrator (even arguably) interpreted the parties contract.'”

Those

In a dispute over whether an arbitrator has authority to grant a video game developer and publisher a perpetual license in the intellectual property as a remedy for the developer’s fraud and breaches of contract, the Fifth Circuit found that the arbitrator’s creative award must be upheld under the Federal Arbitration Act, and set forth

Two circuit court decisions in the last week have denied arbitration motions based on the lack of an arbitration agreement between the parties.  These decisions show that while the federal presumption in favor of arbitration is generally a strong current, it is not strong enough to pull non-signatories into arbitration (or even to stay their