In today’s post I recount an epic battle between the Rules of Professional Conduct (tagline: saving clients from unscrupulous lawyers for over 100 years!) and the Uniform Arbitration Act (tagline: saving arbitration from hostile judges for 60 years!) in the Supreme Court of California. Spoiler alert: the Rules of Professional Conduct win.
The story in
A recent decision from the 10th Circuit shows there is a whole new way to invalidate an arbitration agreement. In Citizen Potawatomi Nation v. Oklahoma, 2018 WL 718606 (10th Cir. Feb. 6, 2018), the court found the arbitration agreement unenforceable because the parties provided for de novo review of any arbitration award in federal court,
Three state supreme courts tackled arbitration law in recent weeks: Alabama, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Rhode Island reversed a construction arbitration award because it disagreed with the arbitrator’s analysis. North Carolina found that an arbitration agreement in a doctor-patient setting was unenforceable as a breach of the doctor’s fiduciary duty. And Alabama strictly enforced
This week, the Fourth Circuit found an arbitration agreement invalid because it waived all federal and state laws. Although two other federal circuit courts had already found the same company’s arbitration agreement unenforceable because it called for an impossible arbitration process, the Fourth Circuit found it invalid for a new reason.
The issue in Hayes
Two state supreme courts found consumer arbitration agreements unenforceable in the past week: Arkansas and New Jersey. Arkansas grounded its decision on the lack of mutuality in the consumer arbitration agreement (similar to Missouri’s recent ruling). Alltel Corp. v. Rosenow, 2014 WL 4656609 (Ark. Sept. 18, 2014). New Jersey grounded its decision on
In a victory for advocates who worry that the odds are impossibly stacked against consumers in some arbitral fora, the Seventh Circuit found that a class of borrowers did not have to proceed with arbitration conducted by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (“Tribe”) in South Dakota “because the arbitral mechanism specified in the agreement is
You hear more about Lena Dunham than you expect, given the audience for “Girls”, right? (Read this article for more.) The same is true, or should be true, for the contract defense of illusoriness. After decades of disuse, it is popping up more and more often as a defense to the enforcement of arbitration clauses
The Supreme Court of Florida has moxie. It issued two new decisions the day before Thanksgiving which go out of their way to sidestep and distinguish the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Rent-A-Center, West v. Jackson, 130 S. Ct. 2772 (2010), in order to find that nursing home residents may not be compelled to