Law Commons^™

Speaker, “Fighting For The Debtor’S Soul: Church Autonomy, Religious Arbitration And Bankruptcy’S Automatic Stay”, Michael Helfand

Michael A Helfand

No abstract provided.

Manifest Disregard And The Imperfect Procedural Justice Of Arbitration, Thomas V. Burch

Scholarly Works

Arbitration is an efficient dispute-resolution system that respects parties’ right to an accurate award. But because arbitration is designed to be efficient, accuracy is not guaranteed. This presents a challenge when courts are asked to confirm or vacate arbitrators’ decisions. Judges dislike approving inaccurate awards, especially in cases where parties have unequal bargaining power. Yet, judges also recognize arbitration’s limited-review principle. So they are forced to balance their desire for accuracy against arbitration’s efficiency policy. Efficiency typically wins at the expense of accurate outcomes.

This Article contends that courts place too much emphasis on the efficiency policy in mandatory arbitration. …

You Promised You Wouldn't Tell: Modifying Arbitration Confidentiality Agreements To Allow Third-Party Access To Prior Arbitration Documents, Gotham Holdings, Heath Grades

Journal of Dispute Resolution

To facilitate the speed, cost-effectiveness, and casual atmosphere of arbitration, it has long been thought that parties must trade in the usual features of the courts, such as precedent, appellate review, and certain evidentiary rules. With the increasing use of arbitration, many parties have begun to demand that some of the comforts that have long accompanied litigation be merged with the benefits of arbitration. Courts have, for the most part, denied such demands. Nevertheless, the Seventh Circuit in Gotham Holdings allowed such a demand by ruling that third parties must have the opportunity to obtain prior arbitration awards and use …

Legislating In The Light: Considering Empirical Data In Crafting Arbitration Reforms, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

Consumer advocates and policymakers call for abolition of predispute arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, while proponents of arbitration claim such abolition would increase companies’ dispute resolution costs, leading to higher prices and interest rates. Policymakers on both sides of the debate, however, rarely consider the empirical research necessary for crafting informed arbitration disclosure rules. This article therefore focuses on how varied research, including my own empirical studies, may inform policies regarding arbitration disclosure regulations. The article also offers suggestions for regulations tailored to have the most impact for the cost in light of this research.

Union Refusal To Arbitrate: Pyett's Unanswered Question, F. Ryan Van Pelt

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Kravar v. Triangle Services, Inc., provides the most workable solution to date, balancing competing union, employer, and employee interests. Kravar gives an employee access to federal court, as a matter of right, in the face of union refusal to arbitrate his or her federal statutory claims.8 Although the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York offered little discussion of the policy behind its new rule, there are sound policy rationales underlying it.

Foreclosure By Arbitration?, R. Wilson Freyermuth

Faculty Publications

The recession and the drastic decline in home values have combined to trigger a wave of foreclosures. Predictably, legislators, policymakers, scholars, and consumer advocates have responded with a wide range of proposals designed to protect distressed mortgagors from losing their homes.

‘Drive-Thru’ Arbitration In The Digital Age: Empowering Consumers Through Regulated Odr, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has been promoted for quickly and conveniently resolving claims using online “drive-thru” processes instead of more costly and time-consuming face-to-face meetings and hearings. Most commentators have nonetheless focused mainly on non-binding or automated bidding processes, perhaps due in part to fairness concerns associated with off-line arbitration. This Article, however, explores the potential for online binding arbitration (OArb), and sheds new light on arbitration as means for empowering consumers to obtain remedies on their e-merchant claims. By moving arbitration online, OArb helps address concerns regarding companies’ use of arbitration clauses to curb consumers’ access to remedies on …

Manifest Disregard And The Imperfect Procedural Justice Of Arbitration, Thomas V. Burch

Thomas V. Burch

Arbitration is an efficient dispute-resolution system that respects parties’ right to an accurate award. But because arbitration is designed to be efficient, accuracy is not guaranteed. This presents a challenge when courts are asked to confirm or vacate arbitrators’ decisions. Judges dislike approving inaccurate awards, especially in cases where parties have unequal bargaining power. Yet, judges also recognize arbitration’s limited-review principle. So they are forced to balance their desire for accuracy against arbitration’s efficiency policy. Efficiency typically wins at the expense of accurate outcomes.

This Article contends that courts place too much emphasis on the efficiency policy in mandatory arbitration. …

What Is '(Im)Partial Enough' In A World Of Embedded Neutrals?, Nancy A. Welsh

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court’s decision in Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co. highlighted the fragility of judicial independence and impartiality in the United States. A similar, less-noticed fragility of independence and impartiality exists among the arbitrators, mediators and administrative hearing officers who resolve an increasing number of disputes. Everywhere one looks, there is unremarked yet remarkable evidence of the rise of - embedded neutrals, particularly in uneven contexts between one-time and repeat players. This phenomenon becomes particularly worrisome when the embedded neutral’s role is due to their special relationship with the repeat player, and the one-time player is not as …

Attorneys As Arbitrators, Adam C. Pritchard, Stephen J. Choi, Jill E. Fisch

Articles

We study the role of attorneys as arbitrators in securities arbitration. We find that arbitrators who also represent brokerage firms or brokers in other arbitrations award significantly less compensation to investor-claimants than do other arbitrators. We find no significant effect for attorney-arbitrators who represent investors or both investors and brokerage firms. The relation between representing brokerage firms and arbitration awards remains significant even when we control for political outlook. Arbitrators who donate money to Democratic political candidates award greater compensation than do arbitrators who donate to Republican can-didates. We also study the dynamics of panel interaction. We find that the …

Evolving Schizophrenic Nature Of Labor Arbitration, The, Martin H. Malin

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Commentators have rightly criticized Pyett for its complete disregard of decades of established precedent. In this article, however, I situate the Pyett decision in the context of an ongoing evolution in labor arbitration as that institution has tried to accommodate the intrusion of public law claims into a private system of workplace self-governance. I suggest that labor arbitration has developed a kind of schizophrenic existence, preserving its role as a substitute for strikes and other workplace strife in a private system of self-governance while accommodating an additional role as a substitute for litigation of public law claims. Nevertheless, I find …

Sweet Vindication: The Second Circuit Strikes A Blow To Companies That Use Class-Action Waivers In Arbitration Agreements To Avoid The Law, Samuel E. Buffaloe

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Other scholars and courts have concluded that when a class action waiver prevents a plaintiff from vindicating his statutory rights, that waiver should be unenforceable. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit took this approach in In re American Express Merchants' Litigation. The court, however, was careful to point out that these class-action waivers should not be considered unenforceable per se, but that courts must examine each waiver on a case-by-case basis. This note will examine the court's reasoning and will discuss what courts and Congress should do to protect consumers when companies use class-action waivers to avoid …

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 …

Arbitration Clauses In Ceo Employment Contracts: An Empirical And Theoretical Analysis, Randall Thomas, Kenneth J. Martin, Erin O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A bill currently pending in Congress would render unenforceable mandatory arbitration clauses in all employment contracts. Some perceive these provisions as employer efforts to deprive employees of important legal rights. Company CEOs are firm employees, and, unlike most other firm employees, they can actually negotiate their employment contracts, very often with attorney assistance. Moreover, many CEO employment contracts are publicly available, so they can be examined empirically. In this paper, we ask whether CEOs bargain to include binding arbitration provisions in their employment contracts. After exploring the theoretical arguments for and against including such provisions in these agreements, we use …

Arbitrating Disputes Between Companies And Individuals: Lessons From Abroad, Peter B. Rutledge, Anna W. Howard

Scholarly Works

Congress is considered changes to the Federal Arbitration Act and the central premise underlying these bills is the idea that the parties to these agreements (typically there is an individual on one side and a company on the other) tend to occupy unequal bargaining positions. The drafters of these bills conclude from this that the individual’s choice to opt into arbitration before a dispute has arisen cannot be considered free and voluntary, and thus, the arbitration agreement should be considered void and unenforceable.

Defenders of these bills claim that the United States, when compared to other nations, stands alone in …

An Empirical Study Of Aaa Consumer Arbitrations, Samantha Zyontz, Christopher R. Drahozal

Faculty Scholarship

This article extends our knowledge of consumer arbitration by presenting results from the first detailed empirical study of consumer arbitration as administered by the AAA. Primarily using a sample of 301 AAA consumer arbitrations that resulted in an award between April and December 2007, it considers such issues as the costs incurred by consumers in arbitration, the speed of the arbitral process, and the outcomes of the cases-the very topics of most interest in the policy debate.

Lawyerless Dispute Resolution: Rethinking A Paradigm, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

Do participants in mediation and arbitration have attorneys? Do they need them? Although the phenomenon of pro se litigation has received substantial attention in recent years, few commentators or policymakers have focused on these questions. The failure to focus on the possible need for representation in mediation and arbitration is based on an often unstated premise that because ADR processes are purportedly non-adversarial or less adversarial than litigation, disputants need representation less in ADR than they do in litigation. This Article suggests that the failure to focus on the possible need for representation in mediation and arbitration is fundamentally misguided. …

Mandatory Employment Arbitration: Keeping It Fair, Keeping It Lawful, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

President Obama's election and the Democrats' takeover of Congress, including what was their theoretically filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, have encouraged organized labor and other traditional Democratic supporters to make a vigorous move for some long-desired legislation. Most attention has focused on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). As initially proposed, the EFCA would enable unions to get bargaining rights through signed authorization cards rather than a secret-ballot election, and would provide for the arbitration of first-contract terms if negotiations fail to produce an agreement after four months. The EFCA would apply to the potentially organizable private-sector working population; at …

Fallout From 14 Penn Plaza V. Pyett: Fractured Arbitration Systems In The Unionized Workplace, Ann C. Hodges

Journal of Dispute Resolution

First, the article will review the history of arbitration of statutory employment claims, including the Pyett decision. Second, the article will look at the history and causes of legalism in arbitration. Then the article will consider the probable responses of employers and unions to Pyett. While predictions are necessarily speculative, it is likely that some unionized employers will seek to require employees to arbitrate statutory claims, perhaps in higher percentages than in the nonunion workplace. While unions may, and perhaps should, resist, many future collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) may contain such provisions. The article then discusses the alternative dispute resolution …

Arbitration Nation: While Arbitration Grows, Judicial Review Of Arbitral Awards May Be Shrinking, F. Shabnam Nouraie

Journal of Dispute Resolution

In Sands v. Menard, Inc., the Court of Appeals of Wisconsin upheld an arbitration award reinstating a discharged attorney to her position as in-house counsel. On appeal, the court refused to vacate the reinstatement order, notwithstanding the fact that reinstatement was not requested or desired by either party, the effect of reinstatement was likely to violate the ethical rules that bind attorneys, and other remedies were available to compensate the aggrieved party. This note explores the limited but important role that judicial review plays, and will continue to play, in arbitration and how this role affected the outcome of Sands …

Holistic Strategy For Coming To Grips With The Creeping Legalism Of Labor Arbitration, A, Stephen L. Hayford

Journal of Dispute Resolution

The commentary that follows is a call to advocates to take back responsibility for settling the disputes that arise during the life of the collective bargaining agreement by becoming more adept negotiators, able and willing to find and engage the truth and unafraid to lead and make difficult decisions. Only then will the legal machinations and contortions that increasingly plague labor arbitration be rendered unnecessary in most circumstances. I assert that the "creeping legalism" of labor arbitration is a symptom of the too-frequent failure of the contractual grievance procedure to resolve difficult disputes. The conundrum that phenomenon presents can be …

Contracting For State Intervention, W. Mark C. Weidemaier

W. Mark C. Weidemaier

Anatomy Of The First Public International Sports Arbitration And The Future Of Public Arbitration After Usada V. Floyd Landis, Maureen A. Weston Prof.

Maureen A Weston

Mere weeks after American professional cyclist Floyd Landis seemingly won the 2006 Tour de France, the United States Anti-Doping Association (USADA), under the authority granted to it by the U.S. Congress, and through its enforcement of the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC), accused him of having committed doping violations during the race. Landis vehemently denied these allegations, and accused the French laboratory that had performed the testing of his post-race samples, the Laboratoire National du Depistage du Dopage (LNDD), of bias and misconduct in his case.

Under USADA rules, an American athlete accused of doping may request an arbitration hearing before …

The Other Avenues Of Hall Street And Prospects For Judicial Review Of Arbitral Awards, Maureen A. Weston Prof.

Maureen A Weston

In Hall Street Associates, L.L.C. v. Mattel, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) provided the exclusive grounds for judicial vacatur and modification of arbitral awards covered under the Act. In so ruling, the Court rejected the contention that the FAA’s requirement to enforce arbitration contracts as written includes private contracts that seek to expand the scope of judicial review beyond the grounds enumerated in the FAA. Despite holding that parties cannot expand a court’s power to review an arbitration award under the FAA, the Court alluded to the possibility of “other possible avenues” for …