I have to confess something: I just returned from sunny California where I attended an excellent arbitrator training course put on by the American Arbitration Association and run by Dana Welch and Michael Powell!  If you have an opportunity to take a course from either of them, I highly recommend it. And, as it so happens, you can!  Check out my prior announcement of the ABA’s Arbitration Institute this March in Phoenix.  Dana Welch will…

Welcome to 2020! I hope that you all had a safe and rejuvenating holiday season.  A new decade brings us plenty of new opportunities for thrilling arbitration news and developments! But, up first, more on class arbitrability.  I know.  I know.  So last decade.  But trust me, this is a case you want to keep an eye on, Jock v. Sterling Jewelers Inc., 942 F.3d 617 (2d Cir. 2019).  I’m not a betting fellow,…

I don’t mean to be imprecise, but I think that the Eleventh Circuit may have recently issued the most luddite opinion I’ve seen in a good long while.  See Managed Care Advisory Group, LLC v. CIGNA Healthcare, Inc., 2019 WL 4464301 (11th Cir. Sept. 18, 2019).  According to the court, Section 7 of the FAA, which allows arbitrators to subpoena non-parties and their documents, must be interpreted narrowly.  And when I say…

For the next installment of the Bookworm, I’m recommending a very recent article by Professor Jean Sternlight: Mandatory Arbitration Stymies Progress Towards Justice in Employment Law: Where To, #MeToo?. For anyone who isn’t already familiar with her work, Professor Sternlight has been at the forefront of thinking about adhesive arbitration for at least two decades.  Her  articles are at the bedrock of any critical appraisal of consumer, employee, and patient arbitration.  Her 1996 piece,…

Four weeks ago, the boundary between public enforcement and private dispute resolution became more blurred.  On September 4, the Justice Department announced that it had agreed to binding arbitration on the key issue in a current merger case—the market definition. The enforcement action is garden variety.  It challenges Novelis Inc.’s proposed acquisition of Aleris Corporation.  According to the DOJ, the transaction would combine two of only four North American producers of aluminum auto body sheet, which automakers…