Law Commons^™

Provisional Measures In Aid Of Arbitration, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

The success of the New York Convention has made arbitration a preferred means of dispute resolution for international commercial transactions. Success in arbitration often depends on the extent to which a party may secure assets, evidence, or the status quo between parties prior to the completion of the arbitration process. This makes the availability of provisional measures granted by either arbitral tribunals or by courts fundamental to the arbitration. In this Article, I consider the existing legal framework for provisional measures in aid of arbitration, with particular attention to the sources of the rules providing for such measures. Those sources …

Global Laboratories Of Third-Party Funding Regulation, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party funding, also known as "dispute finance," is a controversial, dynamic, and evolving arrangement whereby an outside entity ("the funder") finances the legal representation of a party involved in litigation or arbitration, whether domestically or internationally, on a non-recourse basis, meaning that the funder is not entitled to receive any money from the funded party if the case is unsuccessful.' It has been documented in more than sixty countries on six continents worldwide-including in many of the jurisdictions highlighted in this symposium that are experimenting with other aspects of international commercial dispute resolution. Indeed, funding greases the wheels of this …

The Final Frontier: Are Class Action Waivers In Broker-Dealer Employment Agreements Enforceable?, Jill I. Gross

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

How would a court resolve a broker-dealer's action to enforce its class action waiver, which would require the court to disregard FINRA Rule 13204? The Supreme Court has identified one exception to the FAA's mandate: if a “contrary congressional command” displaces the FAA. Thus far, the Court has not had occasion to examine whether a class action waiver in a broker-dealer's employment agreement with an employee is enforceable under this exception. While the Court seems very supportive of these waivers, the securities industry is different. Securities arbitration is heavily regulated, and pronouncements by the SEC--when exercising power expressly delegated to …

Online Dispute Resolution, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This chapter was prepared from a presentation given by the author at the 2019 Summer School in Transnational Commercial Law & Technology, jointly sponsored by the University of Verona School of Law and the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In the paper, I review online dispute resolution (ODR) by considering the following five questions, which I believe help to develop a better understanding of both the concept and the legal framework surrounding it:

A. What is ODR?

B. Who does ODR?

C. What is the legal framework for ODR?

D. What …

Law School News: Appeals Court Hears Labor Arguments At Roger Williams University School Of Law 10-2-2018, Katie Mulvaney, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Procedural Retrenchment And The States, Zachary D. Clopton

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although not always headline grabbing, the Roberts Court has been highly interested in civil procedure. According to critics, the Court has undercut access to justice and private enforcement through its decisions on pleading, class actions, summary judgment, arbitration, standing, personal jurisdiction, and international law.

While I have much sympathy for the Court's critics, the current discourse too often ignores the states. Rather than bemoaning the Roberts Court's decisions to limit court access-and despairing further developments in the age of Trump-we instead might productively focus on the options open to state courts and public enforcement. Many of the aforementioned decisions are …

Reshaping Third-Party Funding, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party funding is a controversial business arrangement whereby an outside entity—called a third-party funder—finances the legal representation of a party involved in litigation or arbitration or finances a law firm’s portfolio of cases in return for a profit. Attorney ethics regulations and other laws permit nonlawyers to become partial owners of law firms in the District of Columbia, England and Wales, Scotland, Australia, two provinces in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and other jurisdictions around the world. Recently, a U.S.-based third-party funder that is publicly traded in England started its own law firm in England. In addition, some U.S. …

Judging Third-Party Funding, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party funding is an arrangement whereby an outside entity finances the legal representation of a party involved in litigation or arbitration. The outside entity—called a “third-party funder”—could be a bank, hedge fund, insurance company, or some other entity or individual that finances the party’s legal representation in return for a profit. Third-party funding is a controversial, dynamic, and evolving phenomenon. The practice has attracted national headlines and the attention of the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Advisory Committee). The Advisory Committee stated in a recent report that “judges currently have the power to obtain information about …

Principal Investments V. Harrison, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 2 (Jan. 14, 2016), Katherine Maher

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court held unless the arbitration agreement commits the question to the arbitrator with “clear and unmistakable” language, a litigation-conduct waiver is presumptively for the court to decide because it is a waiver based on active litigation in court. Thus, the district court judge in this case did not err in addressing whether the moving party waived its right to arbitrate, instead of referring the question to the arbitrator.

Harmonizing Third-Party Litigation Funding Regulation, Victoria Sahani

Faculty Scholarship

Third-party litigation funding is no longer a new phenomenon, but rather is a mainstay in global commerce and dispute resolution. Yet many observers still consider the third-party litigation funding industry as a “wild west” due to a lack of regulation in many countries. Some of the countries that have regulations suffer from a lack of uniformity and an array of conflicting laws at the sub-national level (i.e., the laws of states, provinces, territories, etc.). For example, the United States has a confusing patchwork of state laws on third-party litigation funding. This Article proposes harmonizing the regulatory framework for third-party litigation …

The End Of Class Actions?, Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

In this Article, I give a status report on the life expectancy of class action litigation following the Supreme Court's decisions in Concepcion and American Express. These decisions permitted corporations to opt out of class action liability through the use of arbitration clauses, and many commentators, myself included, predicted that they would eventually lead us down a road where class actions against businesses would be all but eliminated. Enough time has now passed to make an assessment of whether these predictions are coming to fruition. I find that, although there is not yet solid evidence that businesses have flocked to …

The Influence Of Arbitrator Background And Representation On Arbitration Outcomes, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi, Jill E. Fisch

Articles

We study the role of arbitrator background in securities arbitration. We find that several aspects of arbitrator background are correlated with arbitration outcomes. Specifically, industry experience, prior experience as a regulator, and status as a professional or retired arbitrator are correlated with statistically significant differences in arbitration awards. The impact of these characteristics is affected by whether the arbitrator in question serves as the panel chair and by whether the parties to the arbitration are represented by counsel. Our findings offer some preliminary insights into the debate over possible arbitrator bias. On the one hand, they suggest that the party …

Whither Bespoke Procedure?, David A. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

Increasingly we hear that civil procedure lurks in the shadow of private law. Scholars suggest that the civil rules are mere defaults, applying if the parties fail to contract around them. When judges confront terms modifying court procedures — a trend said to be explosive — they seem all-too-willing to surrender to the inevitable logic of private and efficient private ordering. * How concerned should we be? This Article casts a wide net to find examples of private contracts governing procedure, and finds a decided absence of evidence. I search a large database of agreements entered into by public firms, …

Jewish Law Courts In America: Lessons Offered To Sharia Courts By The Beth Din Of America Precedent, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

Although the BDA is now a fifty-year-old organization, its true metamorphosis as an arbitration panel began only in 1996 when it gained autonomy from the Rabbinical Council of America. In the fifteen years since, an independent board of directors has worked with the BDA’s rabbinic leaders to craft an arbitration process that secular courts would feel comfortable upholding. While the BDA’s transformation required some level of compromise within Jewish law itself, the adaptations necessary for judicial acceptance proved to be procedural. Broadly, this meant conforming to the tenets of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA). More specifically, the BDA’s viability came …

Discovery Under 28 U.S.C. §1782: Distinguishing International Commercial Arbitration And International Investment Arbitration, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

For many years, courts, commentators and counsel agreed that 28 U.S.C. §1782 – a somewhat extraordinary procedural device that allows U.S. courts to order discovery in the United States “for use in a proceeding in a foreign or international tribunal” – did not apply to disputes involving international arbitration. However, that presumption has come under challenge in recent years, particularly in the realm of investment arbitration, where the Chevron-Ecuador dispute has made Section 1782 requests a commonplace procedure. This Article takes a rigorous look at both the history and the future of Section 1782 in international arbitration, taking care to …

Whose Regulatory Interests? Outsourcing The Treaty Function, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article I describe the status quo in the area of foreign judgment recognition, with attention to the tension between domestic interests and international cooperation. Precisely because the future of the status quo is in doubt, I then consider current proposals for change, particularly the effort to implement the Hague Choice of Court Convention in the United States. Prominent among the normative questions raised by my account is whose interests, in addition to the litigants’ interests, are at stake – those of the United States, those of the several states, or those of interest groups waving a federal or …

Arbitrability And Vulnerability, Carolyn L. Dessin

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Arbitration is cool. Everybody‟s doing it. In the eighty-five years since the passage of the Federal Arbitration Act, that seems to be the prevailing sentiment. Recent decades have seen the meteoric rise of arbitration as a form of alternative dispute resolution. Arbitration is widely regarded as a less expensive, more expeditious alternative to litigation.

Courts frequently note that federal policy clearly favors arbitration. No judicial enthusiasm for arbitration seems more complete than that evidenced in the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court.

Along with the rise of arbitration, however, there has also been a rise in the amount of …

A Tea Party At The Hague?, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

In this article, I consider the prospects for and impediments to judicial cooperation with the United States. I do so by describing a personal journey that began more than twenty years ago when I first taught and wrote about international civil litigation. An important part of my journey has involved studying the role that the United States has played, and can usefully play, in fostering judicial cooperation, including through judgment recognition and enforcement. The journey continues but, today, finds me a weary traveler, more worried than ever about the politics and practice of international procedural lawmaking in the United States. …

Legal Process In A Box, Or What Class Action Waivers Teach Us About Law-Making, Rhonda Wasserman

Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion advanced an agenda found in neither the text nor the legislative history of the Federal Arbitration Act. Concepcion provoked a maelstrom of reactions not only from the press and the academy, but also from Congress, federal agencies and lower courts, as they struggled to interpret, apply, reverse, or cabin the Court’s blockbuster decision. These reactions raise a host of provocative questions about the relationships among the branches of government and between the Supreme Court and the lower courts. Among other questions, Concepcion and its aftermath force us to grapple with the …

Ducks And Decoys: Revisiting The Exit-Voice-Loyalty Framework In Assessing The Impact Of A Workplace Dispute Resolution System, Zev J. Eigen, Adam Seth Litwin

Faculty Working Papers

Until now, empirical research has been unable to reliably identify the impact of organizational dispute resolution systems (DRSs) on the workforce at large, in part because of the dearth of data tracking employee perceptions pre- and post- implementation. This study begins to fill this major gap by exploiting survey data from a single, geographically-expansive, US firm with well over 100,000 employees in over a thousand locations. The research design allows us to examine employment relations and human resource (HR) measures, namely, perceptions of justice, organizational commitment, and perceived legal compliance, in the same locations before and after the implementation of …

A Moral Contractual Approach To Labor Law Reform: A Template For Using Ethical Principles To Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed To Do So Effectively, Zev J. Eigen, David S. Sherwyn

Faculty Working Papers

If laws cease to work as they should or as intended, legislators and scholars propose new laws to replace or amend them. This paper posits an alternative—offering regulated parties the opportunity to contractually bind themselves to behave ethically. The perfect test-case for this proposal is labor law, because (1) labor law has not been amended for decades, (2) proposals to amend it have failed for political reasons, and are focused on union election win rates, and less on the election process itself, (3) it is an area of law already statutorily regulating parties' reciprocal contractual obligations, and (4) moral means …

Arbitral And Judicial Proceedings: Indistinguishable Justice Or Justice Denied?, Pat K. Chew

Articles

This is an exploratory study comparing the processes and outcomes in the arbitration and the litigation of workplace racial harassment cases. Drawing from an emerging large database of arbitral opinions, this article indicates that arbitration outcomes yield a lower percentage of employee successes than in litigation of these types of cases. At the same time, while arbitration proceedings have some of the same legal formalities (legal representation, legal briefs), they do not have other protective procedural safeguards.

Interlocutory Review By Agreement Of The Parties: A Preliminary Analysis, James Pfander, Dave Pekarek-Krohn

Faculty Working Papers

Although the nineteenth century's final judgment rule no longer represents an absolute barrier to interlocutory appellate review, scholars disagree about what should take its place. Some favor a regime of discretionary interlocutory review, with power conferred on appellate courts to select issues that warrant intervention. Others reject discretionary review as a waste of appellate resources and call upon the rule makers to identify specific categories of non-final orders that always warrant review. While the Supreme Court's collateral order doctrine bears some similarity to this process of categorization, the Court may have called a halt to the judicial recognition of new …

Designer Trials, Elizabeth G. Thornburg

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article considers the intersection of freedom of contract and the trials that have not vanished. Could contracting parties effectively agree in advance of a dispute that any litigation of the case will comply with certain rules? Would such an agreement be enforced even in a contract of adhesion? If so, parties with sufficient bargaining leverage could design away many of the characteristics of litigation that they find unappealing, without the need to resort to private processes. The result: a designer trial with the procedural deck stacked in favor of the party with the greatest pre-dispute bargaining power.

Such a …

Georgia General Assembly Adopts "Manifest Disregard" As A Ground For Vacating Arbitration Awards: How Will Georgia Courts Treat The New Standard?, John W. Hinchey, Thomas V. Burch

Scholarly Works

Generally, courts may only set aside arbitration awards on the grounds listed in the Federal Arbitration Act or the applicable state arbitration code. However, all federal circuit courts and a few state courts have adopted a non-statutory exception that allows a court to overturn an arbitrator's decision if the arbitrator has exemplified a "manifest disregard" of the law.

In 2002, after several years of tentative lower court decisions, the Georgia Supreme Court, in Progressive Data Systems v. Jefferson Holding Corporation, held that manifest disregard is not a proper ground for vacatur in Georgia. The court emphasized that Georgia's Arbitration Code …

The Economics Of Litigation And Arbitration: An Application To Franchise Contracts, Keith N. Hylton, Christopher R. Drahozal

Faculty Scholarship

If we define the deterrence benefits from contract enforcement as avoided harms net of avoidance costs, we should expect contracting parties to choose the dispute resolution forum that provides the greatest difference between deterrence benefits and dispute resolution costs for every type of dispute. We apply this general framework to franchise contracts and conduct an empirical analysis of the determinants of arbitration agreements among franchising parties. Although it is obvious that contracting parties have an incentive to choose arbitration in order to reduce dispute-resolution costs, there have been no studies of the importance of deterrence concerns. We examine the deterrence …

Ulysses Tied To The Generic Whipping Post: The Continuing Odyssey Of Discovery "Reform", Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

One need not be a charter member of the Critical Legal Studies Movement (“CLS”) to see a few fundamental contradictions in litigation practice in the United States. A prominent philosophical tenet of the CLS movement is that law and society are gripped by a “fundamental contradiction” and simultaneously seek to embrace contradictory objectives. Civil litigation, particularly discovery, is no exception: New amendments to the discovery rules are the latest example of this contradiction. Although the new changes are not drastic, they continue the post-1976 pattern of making discovery the convenient scapegoat for generalized complaints about the dispute resolution system. One …

Recent Case Developments, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Recent case developments in Insurance Law in the years 1999 and 2000.

Identifying Real Dichotomies Underlying The False Dichotomy: Twenty-First Century Mediation In An Eclectic Regime, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Some people (lawyers, scholars, judges, dispute resolvers, policymakers) are more concerned about fidelity to procedural protocols while others are more concerned with the substantive rules governing disputes and substantive outcomes. Those in the dispute resolution community preferring facilitation tend to be proceduralists. For them, the observance of proper procedure is a high goal, perhaps the dominant goal. They reason, often implicitly, that adherence to the rules of procedure is the essence of neutrality, fairness, and the proper role of a dispute resolving apparatus. At some level, usually subconscious, there is a post-modern philosophical aspect of this preference. Because humans cannot …

The Inevitability Of The Eclectic: Liberating Adr From Ideology, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

The problem with viewing facilitation as the only legitimate form of mediation, of course, is that it borders on tautology: mediation is nonevaluative, therefore any evaluation in mediation must be impermissible. Although this view remains strongly held in many quarters, it appears to be in retreat, both within the mediation community and in the legal community at large. Courts and commentators have shown increasing favor toward some evaluative or advising component of mediation. More important, the eclectic style appears to be what takes place in the metaphorical trenches of mediation practice (although sound empirical data is necessarily hard to obtain …