I see more and more arbitration agreements that contain their own limitations period (the timeline for bringing a dispute in arbitration). Are all of those necessarily enforceable? No.
In Order of United Commercial Travelers of America v. Wolfe, 331 U.S. 586 (1947), the Supreme Court held that contracts may shorten the statute of limitations
In a dispute over how faithful a court must be to the parties’ arbitration agreement when it is asked to resolve an impasse in arbitrator selection under Section 5 of the FAA, the Fifth Circuit decided the court must give effect to the letter of the agreement, even if that defies its spirit.
In BP
It must be near the end of the clerk year, because courts are going gangbusters issuing opinions. Today, a roundup of three arbitration decisions from Southern states. Notably, Louisiana makes it tough for lawyers to enforce arbitration agreements with their clients.
After prominently noting that the lower court rulings were “eminently reasonable, logical and just,”
With less colorful language than its last arbitration opinion, the First Circuit sided with the Second and Third Circuits in limiting the application of the 2010 Stolt-Nielsen decision on the availability of class arbitration. Fantastic Sams Franchise Corp. v. FSRO Assoc. Ltd., __ F.3d __, 2012 WL 2402560 (1st Cir. June 27, 2012).
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
The Fifth Circuit just issued a decision openly disagreeing with how the Second Circuit has interpreted both the Stolt-Nielsen decision and case law regarding the level of deference that courts owe arbitrators. In Reed v. Florida Metropolitan Univ., Inc., __ F.3d __, 2012 WL 1759298 (5th Cir. May 18, 2012), the Fifth Circuit vacated
A few months ago I posted about actions that FINRA and the NLRB were taking in support of allowing class arbitration, and those agencies have recently taken additional actions that help consumers or employees with relatively low dollar claims.
The NLRB brought a complaint against 24 Hour Fitness USA, Inc. The complaint alleges that 24
Maryland’s highest court recently affirmed the dismissal of an employer’s non-compete claims as time-barred, even though the employer argued that the parties’ arbitration excused the untimely filing. Kumar v. Dhanda, __ A.3d ___, 2012 WL 1521567 (Md. May 2, 2012).
The employee, a urologist, had signed a contract calling for all disputes to be “resolved
Although courts and practitioners may think of the Stolt-Nielsen decision as the death knell of class arbitration, the Third Circuit’s ruling last week serves as a reminder that the Stolt-Nielsen did not deal a mortal blow. In fact, in Sutter v. Oxford Health Plans LLC, __ F.3d __, 2012 WL 1088887 (3d Cir. April
The Supreme Court of Arkansas has joined Florida, Ohio, and Arizona (at least) in holding that a non-lawyer is guilty of the “unauthorized practice of law” if he or she attempts to represent a corporation in arbitration proceedings. Nisha v. Tribuilt Constr. Group, __ S.W.3d __, 2012 1034641 (Ark. Mar. 29, 2012).
Nisha involved a