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The Judicial Grassroots Of The "Arbitration Revolution", Tamar Meshel

William & Mary Business Law Review

The “arbitration revolution”—the meteoric rise in the use of arbitration in the United States—is commonly imputed to the Supreme Court’s unilateral and ideologically driven expansion of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). The portrayal of the FAA’s evolution as a campaign launched by a Supreme Court that is out of touch with society and with the judicial system over which it presides usefully serves to delegitimize both this one-hundred year-old statute and arbitration more generally. This Article argues that the popular description of the Supreme Court as the sole instigator of the “arbitration revolution” is misleading because it conveniently ignores a …