Law Commons^™

Mandatory Arbitration For Customers But Not For Peers: A Study Of Arbitration Clauses In Consumer And Non-Consumer Contracts, Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey P. Miller, Emily Sherwin

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

We conducted a study of contractual practices by well-known firms marketing consumer products, comparing the firms' consumer contracts with contracts the same firms negotiated with business peers. The frequency of arbitration clauses in consumer contracts has been studied before, as has the frequency of arbitration clauses in non-consumer contracts. Our study is the first to compare the use of arbitration clauses within firms, in different contractual contexts.

The results are striking: in our sample, mandatory arbitration clauses appeared in more than three-quarters of consumer contracts and less than one tenth of non-consumer contracts (excluding employment contracts) negotiated by the same …

Cultural Conflicts, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article builds upon insights from contemporary anthropology to rethink the field of conflicts as a matter of cultural conflict. This approach shifts the analysis away from the dominant approaches in the discipline, which take as their primary metric either questions of state power or of individual rights. Drawing on a case of conflict between Native American legal norms and U.S. state and federal law, this article argues for a conflicts methodology that takes seriously the role of cultural description in the process of cultural adjudication. To do so, in turn will require us to adopt a more sophisticated, flexible, …