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 …

Summary Of Five Star Capital Corp. V. Ruby, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 88, Michelle D. Alarie

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court’s grant of summary judgment against petitioner Five Star Capital Corp. for bringing a second lawsuit barred by res judicata.

Bill Would Encourage Effective Dispute Resolution, John R. Nolon, Jessica A. Bacher

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Many of the processes involved in traditional local land use review procedures involve two or more adversarial parties arguing their position with little to no consideration for the other party’s interest, and no regard for mutually beneficial outcome. This article describes a proposed New York law that would promote the use of mediation to supplement the traditional process. The article discusses studies geared towards testing the effectiveness of mediation, gives a review of out of state mediation legislation, as discusses corresponding court decisions. Finally, the article concludes with a review of the traditional roles of lawyers in the process, and …

Was Machiavelli Right? Lying In Negotiation And The Art Of Defensive Self-Help, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

The majority of law review articles addressing lying and deception in negotiation have argued, in one form or another, that liars and deceivers could be successfully reined in and controlled if only the applicable ethics rules were strengthened, and if corresponding enforcement powers were sufficiently beefed up and effectively executed. This article takes a different approach, arguing that the applicable ethics rules will likely never be strengthened, and, furthermore, that even if they were, they would be difficult to enforce in any meaningful way, at least in the context of negotiation. The article concludes that lawyers, businesspeople, and everyone else …

Enforcing Class Arbitration In The International Sphere: Due Process And Public Policy Concerns, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

This article appears to be the first to address the unique issues relating to international class arbitration and to discuss the status of class arbitration in other countries. To date, the only published articles on class arbitration - a dispute resolution mechanism that has been in existence in the United States since the early 1980s - have focused on domestic arbitration. However, with a number of known international class arbitrations in progress, all seated in the United States, questions concerning the transnational legitimacy of the class arbitration process and the ability to enforce class awards under the New York Convention …

Ethical Considerations In Drafting And Enforcing Consumer Arbitration Clauses, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

Attorneys face mixed messages regarding consumer arbitration: Mixed professional responsibility rules; mixed legal enforcement; mixed messages from commentators and policymakers; mixed evidence regarding efficiency, cost-savings and fairness. It is therefore doubtful that attorneys would face discipline for drafting or enforcing onerous consumer arbitration provisions they believe in good faith to be lawful. Professional discipline rules, however, merely set the floor for ethical conduct and can only go so far in dictating morals or teaching values. Indeed, an attorney's commitment to ethics and public service "must begin at home." Moreover, the bottom line is: "If you have the wrong values, your …

C-Drum News, V. 2, No. 1, Fall 2008

The C-DRUM News

No abstract provided.

Curing Consumer Warranty Woes Through Regulated Arbitration, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

This article proposes legislative procedural reforms accounting for the realities of consumer arbitration that have threatened and denied consumers' access to remedies for companies' violations of public, or statutory, warranty remedies under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (MMWA). Furthermore, the Article proposes to clarify and expand the MMWA's current dispute resolution template in order to resolve judicial disagreement regarding the template's application and foster beneficial use of finding arbitration. Accordingly, this is not a call to ban all pre-dispute arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, but is instead an invitation for more politically palatable reforms that preserve both companies' savings and consumers' …

Summary Of Anse, Inc. V. Eighth Judicial Dist. Court Of State Ex Rel. County Of Clark, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 74, Joanna M. Myers

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Barney V. Mt. Rose Heating & Air Conditioning, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 71, Elena Roberts

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

No abstract provided.

The Effective Reach Of Choice Of Law Agreements, Tiong Min Yeo

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Two fundamental principles relating to party autonomy developed in the recent history of the conflict of laws. Despite initial reservations, the law today takes for granted that the parties’ agreement is nearly conclusive in respect of both their choice of litigation forum and their choice of the law governing the contractual relationship. Meanwhile, the law of obligations – in tort, restitution and equity – has grown apace; disputes between contracting parties today are rarely confined to pure contractual issues. Can contracting parties choose the law to govern non-contractual disputes in cross-border litigation? In the absence of such choice, to what …

The Mediation Metamodel: Understanding Practice, Nadja Alexander

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The mediation metamodel provides a systematic framework for understanding mediation as it is practiced in a variety of professional and cultural contexts. Six mediation practices are introduced within the framework of the metamodel: settlement mediation, facilitative mediation, transformative mediation, expert advisory mediation, wise counsel mediation, and tradition-based mediation. The relationships of these different practices to one another are explored and the assumptions underlying them are examined with reference to the literature. The metamodel provides orientation in the dispute resolution field not only for mediators, parties, and their lawyers, but also for regulators, referring bodies, researchers, and students of mediation.

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, …

Whither Arbitration?, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

Over the past several decades, scholars and policymakers have debated the future of arbitration in the United States. Those debates have taken on new significance in the present Congress, which is considering a variety of reform proposals. Among the most widely watched are ones that would prohibit the enforcement of predispute arbitration clauses in employment, consumer, and franchise contracts. Reviewing the available empirical literature, the paper explains how many of the assumptions driving the arbitration reform debate are unproven at best and flatly wrong at worst. It then tries to sketch out the economic impact of any move by Congress …

State And Local Governments Address The Twin Challenges Of Climate Change And Energy Alternatives, Irma S. Russell, Jeffery S. Dennis

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Confronting Adr Agreements' Contract/No-Contract Conundrum With Good Faith, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

This Article explores the intricate problem, or conundrum, of enforcing "Alternative Dispute Resolution ('ADR') agreements" that require mediation or other non-binding dispute resolution procedures. Although public policy supports ADR, courts' inadequate analysis of ADR agreements is threatening their vitality. Instead of properly considering the flexible nature of these agreements, courts assume formalist contract or no-contract conclusions similar to those they impose on what Professor Charles Knapp has termed "contracts to bargain." ADR agreements and other contracts to bargain pose enforcement problems because they require parties' cooperation without specifying what cooperation means or how to enforce such flexible duties. This Article …

The Mediator As Fugu Chef: Preserving Protections Without Poisoning The Process, Maureen Laflin

Articles

No abstract provided.

Brief Amicus Curiae Of The National Academy Of Arbitrators In Support Of Respondents, 14 Penn Plaza V. Pyett, No. 07-581 (U.S. June 27, 2008), James Oldham

U.S. Supreme Court Briefs

No abstract provided.

Is That All There Is? "The Problem" In Court-Oriented Mediation, Leonard L. Riskin, Nancy A. Welsh

Faculty Scholarship

The alternative process of mediation is now well-institutionalized and widely (though not universally) perceived to save time and money and satisfy lawyers and parties. However, the process has failed to meet important aspirations of its early proponents and certain expectations and needs of one-shot players. In particular, court-oriented mediation now reflects the dominance and preferences of lawyers and insurance claims adjusters. These repeat players understand the problem to be addressed in personal injury, employment, contract, medical malpractice and other ordinary civil non-family disputes as a matter of merits assessment and litigation risk analysis. Mediation is structured so that litigation issues …

Mediation And The Art Of Regulation, Nadja Alexander

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In a political climate filled with talk of how to best regulate mediation, it is surprising that so little regulatory theory has been brought into the discussion. The aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework for informed debate in relation to the regulation of mediation. The framework comprises two parts. First, four international regulatory trends in mediation are introduced: the market-contract, self-regulatory, formal framework and formal legislative approaches. Against this background the second part deals with the specific content of regulatory provisions on mediation. The resulting framework is called the Mediation Mix, which brings form and content …

Is That All There Is? "The Problem" In Court-Oriented Mediation, Leonard L. Riskin, Nancy A. Welsh

UF Law Faculty Publications

The alternative process of mediation is now well-institutionalized and widely (though not universally) perceived to save time and money and satisfy lawyers and parties. However, the process has failed to meet important aspirations of its early proponents and certain expectations and needs of one-shot players. In particular, court-oriented mediation now reflects the dominance and preferences of lawyers and insurance claims adjusters. These repeat players understand the problem to be addressed in personal injury, employment, contract, medical malpractice and other ordinary civil non-family disputes as a matter of merits assessment and litigation risk analysis. Mediation is structured so that litigation issues …

Arbitration And Article Iii, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

Does arbitration violate Article III? Despite the critical need for a coherent theory to answer this question, few commentators or courts have made serious attempts to provide one. For much of the country's history, federal courts conveniently could avoid this nettlesome question. Prior to the twentieth century, courts simply declined to enforce pre-dispute arbitration agreements as unenforceable attempts to appropriate their jurisdiction. From the early decades of the twentieth century (with the enactment of the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) in 1925) through the 1960s, the non-arbitrability doctrine prevented arbitrators from resolving issues of federal statutory law. Notably, while both of …

Non-Signatories And The New York Convention, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

In the context of arbitrations subject to the New York Convention, the term ,non-signatory' might evoke several lines of inquiry. Must commitments to arbitrate be signed? What legal framework guides decision-making about who agreed to arbitrate? How should courts monitor an arbitrator's assertion of jurisdiction over someone who never signed an arbitration agreement?

The second of these matters - rules about who agreed to arbitrate - will retain our attention in this paper. While few commentators deny that arbitration rests on consent,¹ less unanimity exists about what exactly constitutes such consent when one side contests that it ever waived …

C-Drum News, V. 1, No. 2, Spring 2008

The C-DRUM News

No abstract provided.

Who Can Be Against Fairness? The Case Against The Arbitration Fairness Act, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

In this brief essay, I hope to lay out the case against the Arbitration Fairness Act.3 Part I of this Article addresses the “findings” on which the act is premised. It explains how in several respects the current research on arbitration flatly contradicts the premises animating those findings (in other respects, the data is incomplete, so the “findings” at best are better described as “untested hypotheses” or “assumptions”). Part II of this Article explains why postdispute arbitration is not a viable alternative to our present system of enforceable predispute arbitration clauses.

An Appreciation Of Marc Galanter's Scholarship, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This brief essay highlights three of Marc Galanter's works to illustrate qualities that seem especially worth emulating. Galanter's classic article, Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change, focuses on how the legal system actually operates in daily life and challenges a conventional wisdom that simply providing have-nots with more lawyers would substantially reduce inequality. The article is particularly relevant to the dispute resolution field, focusing on the vast majority of legally-oriented behavior that occurs outside of court. It distinguishes truly private dispute resolution (such as self-help, withdrawal from relationships, and intra-group processes) from settlement …

Resolving Conflict In Non-Ideal, Complex Systems: Solutions For The Law-Science Breakdown In Environmental And Natural Resource Law, Barbara Cosens

Articles

In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court decided a consolidated case concerning the scope of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' jurisdiction to require permits for dredge and fill of wetlands under section 404 of the Clean Water Act, issuing a plurality, two concurrences, and two dissents. Each opinion has a solid legal foundation, yet none truly makes sense if the science of the resource in question is considered. The opinions in Rapanos v. United States illuminate the struggle at the law-science interface. The problem is not due to either a failure in legal reasoning or a failure in scientific methodology …

Summary Of Torrealba V. Kesmetis, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 10, Barbara Mcdonald

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from a district court summary judgment in a tort action.

Book Review - The Science Of Settlement: Ideas For Negotiators, Rebekah K. Maxwell

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Summary Of Loomis V. Whitehead, 124 Nev. Adv. Op. No. 7, Charles R. Peterson

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

Appeal from an order granting partial summary judgment in a contract action. Summary judgment was based on NRS 602.070, barring persons who fail to file a fictitious name certificate from suing on any contract or agreement made under the fictitious name. Nevada Supreme Court (the “Court”) reversed and remanded.