Law Commons^™

Expanding The Ban On Forced Arbitration To Race Claims, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

When Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (“EFASASHA”) in March 2022, it signaled a major retreat from the Supreme Court’s broad enforcement of agreements to force employees and consumers to arbitrate discrimination claims. But the failure to cover protected discriminatory classes other than sex, especially race, tempers any exuberance attributable to the passage of EFASASHA. This Article prescribes an approach for employees and consumers to rely upon EFASASHA as a tool to prevent both race and sex discrimination claims from being forced into arbitration by employers and companies. This approach relies upon procedural …

Special Challenges In Execution Of Arbitral Awards In Public Private Partnerships, Srividhya Ragavan, Niraj Kumar Seth

Faculty Scholarship

With around 47 million pending cases at various stages of Indian judiciary and one of the lowest levels of judges per million of population in the world, India’s arbitration regime presents a ray of hope for millions of Indians who face the prospect of justice being denied to them due to inordinate delays caused by a clogged judicial pipeline. The enactment of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 was presented as a viable alternative to resolve commercial disputes in a timely manner. This paper uses a case study to discuss how arbitration in India has not fulfilled the timeliness promise …

Black And Blue Police Arbitration Reforms, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

The racial justice protests that engulfed the country after seeing a video of the appalling killing of a Black male, George Floyd, by a Minnesota police officer in 2020 has led to a tremendous number of questions about dealing with racial issues in policing. Similar concerns arose a little more than fifty years ago when police unions gained power to respond to the civil rights protests occurring during those times by establishing strong protections for their officers in light of brutality claims. This rhythmic progression of protests and union responses is destined to continue without any lasting reforms focused on …

Discovering Our Field In Our Stories, Howard Gadlin, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

It’s the people who make a field.

This book draws on the thought-provoking, diverse, delightful, sometimes painful, and ultimately beautiful personal histories of some of the thinkers, inventors, influencers, reformers, disrupters, and transformers who have created—and continue to create—the field of conflict resolution. The authors of the essays in this book play a variety of roles: mediator, facilitator, arbitrator, ombuds, academic, system designer, entrepreneur, leader of public or private conflict resolution organization, researcher, advocate for conflict resolution, critic of conflict resolution. They represent the various waves of people who have populated our field, the founders, the institutionalizers, and the leaders …

The Blurring Of The Public/Private Distinction Or The Collapse Of A Category? The Story Of Investment Arbitration, Guillermo J. Garcia Sanchez

Faculty Scholarship

The paper is a response piece to Deborah Hensler and Damira Khatam’s new article, Re-inventing Arbitration: How Expanding the Scope of Arbitration Is Re-Shaping Its Form and Blurring the Line Between Private and Public Adjudication. Their main argument regarding the public-private distinction is that the arbitral procedure has changed as a consequence of the substantive issues resolved in this particular ADR system. According to them the arbitral system, which was originally conceived for commercial purposes, has become another way of litigating public law, but without the accountability mechanisms attached to public courts. In this paper, I agree in large part …

Can Nfl Players Obtain Judicial Review Of Arbitration Decisions On The Merits When A Typical Hourly Union Worker Cannot Obtain This Unusual Court Access?, Michael Z. Green, Kyle T. Carney

Faculty Scholarship

Several recent court cases, brought on behalf of National Football League (NFL) players by their union, the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), have increased media and public attention to the challenges of labor arbitrator decisions in federal courts. The Supreme Court has established a body of federal common law that places a high premium on deferring to labor arbitrator decisions and counseling against judges deciding the merits of disputes covered by a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). A recent trend suggests federal judges have ignored this body of law and analyzed the merits of labor arbitration decisions in the NFL setting.

NFL …

Using The Theories Of Exit, Voice, Loyalty, And Procedural Justice To Reconceptualize Brazil's Rejection Of Bilateral Investment Treaties, Nancy A. Welsh, Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Kathryn Rimpfel

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, investor-state arbitration has made tremendous gains in both credibility and use. There is now widespread accession to the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (“ICSID Convention” or “Washington Convention”). States have executed more than 2,000 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) defining the terms and conditions under which one (“investor”) state’s nationals and companies will invest in the other (“host”) state. Such terms include provisions allowing foreign investors to initiate arbitration proceedings against the host state, and at this point, more than 500 disputes have been submitted to investor-state arbitration. …

The Thoughtful Integration Of Mediation Into Bilateral Investment Treaty Arbitration, Nancy A. Welsh, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

While the current system of investment treaty arbitration has definitely improved upon the “gunboat diplomacy” used at times to address disputes between states and foreign investors, there are signs that reform is needed: states and investors increasingly express concerns regarding the costs associated with the arbitration process, some states refuse to comply with arbitral awards, other states hesitate to sign new bilateral investment treaties, and citizens have begun to engage in popular unrest at the prospect of investment treaty arbitration. As a result, both investors and states are advocating for the use of mediation to supplement investor-state arbitration. This Article …

Mandatory Predispute Consumer Arbitration, Structural Bias, And Incentivizing Procedural Safeguards, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Within the past several decades, there has been an explosion in the creation, institutionalization and use of “alternative” dispute resolution procedures. Mandatory predispute arbitration has generated the most controversy because it appears beset with structural bias. The recent cases of AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion and Compucredit Corp. v. Greenwood have raised additional concerns as the Supreme Court has announced that corporations can force consumers to arbitrate their private and statutory claims and give up their rights to pursue class relief. This Article begins by arguing that the Supreme Court’s enthusiastic embrace of mandatory predispute arbitration should be understood primarily …

Becoming "Investor-State Mediation", Nancy A. Welsh, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

While the current system of investment treaty arbitration has definitely improved upon the “gunboat diplomacy” used at times to address disputes between states and foreign investors, there are signs that reform is needed. Increasingly, states and investors express concerns regarding the costs associated with the arbitration process; some states are refusing to comply with arbitral awards; other states now hesitate to sign new bilateral investment treaties; and citizens have begun to engage in popular unrest at the prospect of investment treaty arbitration. As a result, both investors and states are advocating for the use of mediation to supplement investor-state arbitration. …

Integrating "Alternative" Dispute Resolution Into Bankruptcy: As Simple (And Pure) As Motherhood And Apple Pie?, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

Today, there can be little doubt that “alternative” dispute resolution is anything but alternative. Nonetheless, many judges, lawyers (and law students) do not truly understand the dispute resolution processes that are available and how they should be used. In the shadow of the current economic crisis, this lack of knowledge is likely to have negative consequences, particularly in those areas of practice such as bankruptcy and foreclosure in which clients, lawyers, regulators, and courts work under pressure, often with inadequate time and financial resources to permit careful analysis of procedural options. Potential negative effects can include: (1) impairment of a …

An Essay Challenging The Racially Biased Selection Of Arbitrators For Employment Discrimination Suits, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1991, employers have increasingly decided to require that employees agree to arbitrate statutory employment discrimination claims as a condition of employment. This Essay seeks to expose some of the potential discriminatory components that may arise in the arbitrator selection process while highlighting the lack of legal remedy for those who believe that employers, in conjunction with neutral service provders, have stacked the pool in favor of having arbitrators who tend to be older, white and male. The Essay suggests the use of 42 U.S.C. Section 1981 as a potential remedy and challenge to the dearth of arbitrators of color …

Between Dialogue And Decree: International Review Of National Courts, Robert B. Ahdieh

Faculty Scholarship

Recent years have seen dramatic growth in the number of international tribunals at work across the globe, from the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, to the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Claims in Switzerland and the International Criminal Court. With this development has come both increased opportunity for interaction between national and international courts and increased occasion for conflict. Such friction was evident in the recent decision in Loewen Group, Inc. v. United States, in which an arbitral panel constituted under the North American Free Trade Agreement found …

The Place Of Court-Connected Mediation In A Democratic Justice System, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

A justice system, and the processes located within it, ought to deliver justice. That seems simple enough. But, of course, delivering justice is never so simple. Justice and the systems that serve it are the creatures of context.

This Article considers mediation as just one innovation within the much larger evolution of the judicial system of the United States. First, this Article outlines how the values of democratic governance undergird our traditional picture of the American justice system, presumably because the invocation of such values helps the system to deliver something that will be respected by the nation’s citizens as …