The focus today is recent state appellate court decisions on arbitration. Because there are an awful lot of them, I am going to divide them roughly into those that are pro arbitration, and those that are hostile to arbitration.  This post focuses on the three relatively hostile cases (with the friendly cases coming in a

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

Continuing last week’s theme of “States Gone Wild,” here are three more oddball summer decisions from state supreme courts. All of them find interesting paths around federal case law (IMHO).

Georgia Says Class Complaint Is Deemed Arbitration Opt Out For All Class Members

In Bickerstaff v. SunTrust Bank, 2016 WL 3693778 (Ga. July 8,

In a decision that appears intentionally controversial, the Supreme Court of New Jersey yesterday refused to enforce the delegation clause in a for-profit college’s enrollment agreement in a 5-1 opinion.  Morgan v. Sanford Brown Institute, 2016 WL 3248016 (N.J. June 14, 2016).  Although the delegation clause had never been specifically challenged by the plaintiffs, as

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

A recent decision from a federal district court in Tennessee raises a discrepancy in how the courts treat arbitration agreements that hinder a plaintiff’s state law and federal law claims.  Cases under the FAA state that arbitration agreements cannot be enforced if enforcement means plaintiffs will not be able to effectively vindicate their federal statutory

To date, courts have largely limited the impact of the Rent-A-Center decision to arbitration agreements with explicit delegation clauses. But, what if Rent-A-Center applied to every single arbitration agreement that mentioned the AAA rules?  That is a very real possibility, and one which would send almost all arbitrability disputes to arbitrators.

The ­Rent-A-Center decision used

Relying on the Rent-A-Center decision, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision today that construed the parties’ relevant arbitration agreement very narrowly, thereby ducking a decision about whether the larger “disputes” section of the contract was void under state law.  That makes the Eighth Circuit the first federal court to do exactly what