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
presumption
Another Federal Appeals Court Finds Availability of Class Arbitration Is Question for Court
In a footnote in Sutter, SCOTUS hinted that the question of whether an arbitration agreement allowed for class arbitration may be one of the “gateway” questions of arbitrability that are presumptively for courts to decide. Last year, the Sixth Circuit went one step further, finding that the availability of class arbitration defaults to the courts. …
No Federal Presumption of Arbitrability Until Court Finds Valid Arbitration Agreement
A new opinion from the Eleventh Circuit highlights an issue that can be confusing to those encountering FAA case law for the first time: when does the federal presumption of arbitrability apply? The answer is the presumption only applies to whether the scope of an arbitration agreement is broad enough to encompass the parties’ dispute,…
SCOTUS Struggles With Standard Of Review For Arbitrator's Decision To Allow Class Arbitration
While the oral argument before the United States Supreme Court in Sutter today was ostensibly about whether to affirm an arbitrator’s decision that the parties’ contract authorized class arbitration, the decision really turns on how the Court will review all arbitration decisions. (Transcript here.) Multiple Justices expressed an unwillingness to create a special …