The 9th Circuit’s decision to enforce the arbitration agreement in Uber’s agreements with drivers made lots of news last week. And although it includes no new principles of law, it does emphasize some principles that come up regularly in consumer and employment arbitration, so it’s worth reviewing the details.
Former drivers brought an action in
On Monday of this week, after stringing the parties along for five months, SCOTUS denied cert in a case involving the intersection between arbitration and franchise regulation. The petition was filed in November of 2015, and after the respondent initially declined to respond, the Court specifically requested a response, and conferenced the case twice, before
The Supreme Court of California this week enforced the arbitration agreement between an employee and employer. Yes, you read that right. While reputed to be reliably anti-arbitration, California’s highest court continues to provide evidence that it is tired of being reversed by SCOTUS * and is ready to follow federal precedent on the FAA.
In
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
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
One way to challenge the very existence of an agreement to arbitrate is to say that the parties’ contract said nothing about arbitration and did not validly incorporate any other document calling for arbitration. Oklahoma and Alabama have recently come out at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what kind of notice must
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
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
In an example of “What Not to Vacate,” the South Dakota Supreme Court just vacated an arbitration award because the arbitrator dared to apply a South Dakota statute allowing attorneys’ fees to the claimant. A week earlier, the Ohio Supreme Court also vacated an arbitration award for granting a remedy that the court found exceeded
In the past year, if I wrote about “FLSA” and “arbitration” in the same post, it likely meant that another federal court had found employers can include class action waivers in their employment contracts without violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. Today, however, is different. The Eleventh Circuit last week found that it was the