A few months ago, the Ninth Circuit found that the arbitration agreement in Barnes & Noble’s website was not enforceable.  This week, the Ninth Circuit found that the arbitration agreement Sirius XM Radio relied upon was not enforceable because the user did not know he had any agreement with Sirius XM, let alone an arbitration

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

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.

This week the Supreme Court of California held that the FAA preempts California’s 2007 Gentry ruling, one that protected employees from nearly all class action waivers in arbitration agreements.  Iskanian v. CLS Transp. Los Angeles, LLC, __ P.3d__, 2014 WL 2808963 (Cal. June 23, 2014).  However, asserting its Californian-ness, the court found an clever

In a beautifully written opinion, the Tenth Circuit examined an under-used aspect of the Federal Arbitration Act this week: having a jury or court trial. Usually disputes about arbitrability can be determined on a motion akin to summary judgment, but the FAA states in Section Four: “If the making of the arbitration agreement or the

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

SCOTUS announced today that it would not review the Third Circuit’s decision in Strine v. Delaware Coalition for Open Government, Inc, holding that Delaware’s Chancery Court could not offer its judges’ services as neutral arbitrators in its courtrooms, unless those arbitrations were open to the public.  Therefore, that decision is final and Delaware will now

California is the Judd Nelson of The Preemption Club.  (Or the John Bender, if you prefer using character names.)  The Supreme Court has sent the California courts to preemption detention for ignoring the Federal Arbitration Act in blockbuster, groundbreaking cases (see Concepcion).  But California cannot help itself.  It keeps coming up with novel arguments