Articles

Gil Sanchez bought a used Mercedes for $54,000.  He signed a standard sales contract used by dealerships throughout California, that he did not read.  If he had read it, he might have noticed the arbitration provision on the back of the contract, outlined by a black box.  He might also have noticed the class action waiver in its arbitration prov ...

Janet Chochorowski rented a garden tiller from Home Depot for $25.  Although she did not read the rental contract before she signed it, she signed at the bottom and also initialed acceptance of an optional provision that imposed a fee in exchange for Home Depot's waiver of any claims for damages against her if she negligently damaged the equipment ...

For the second time this year, the United States Supreme Court slapped down a state supreme court that refused to abide by the High Court's arbitration decisions. In today's unsigned opinion in Nitro-Lift Technologies, L.L.C. v. Howard, the miscreant tribunal this time was the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which struck down a noncompete agreement that c ...

Environment -- Endangered Caribou The United States Fish & Wildlife Service announced a drastic (and well-justified) reduction in critical habitat for the Selkirk Caribou from 375,000 to approximately 30,000 acres, based largely on the fact that the caribou do not live in lower elevations in Idaho as originally assumed. We still, however, d ...

Today PLF filed an amicus brief in Oxford Health Plans LLC v. Sutter, pending in the United States Supreme Court.  The issue is whether an arbitrator can order parties to class arbitration when the arbitration agreement is silent on that matter.  PLF argues that because class arbitration is fundamentally different than individual arbitration, imp ...

This week PLF filed an amicus brief in the Washington Supreme Court in Hill v. Garda CL, arguing that class arbitration cannot be imposed on parties merely because they agreed to individual arbitration.  As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Stolt-Nielsen v. AnimalsFeeds, the differences between individual and class arbitration are so great ...

In 2011, the United States Supreme Court decided in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion that courts could not invalidate arbitration contracts that require individual arbitration (as opposed to a class-wide proceeding) simply because a state's public policy favors class actions.  In the two years since, state courts have largely been upholding arbitra ...

Janet Chochorowski rented a garden tiller from Home Depot for $25, plus an optional charge of $2.50 for a damage waiver.  She signed a contract accepting these charges, including the optional $2.50.  Later, though, she sued Home Depot, purportedly as a class action under Missouri's consumer protection act, arguing that the optional fee was "autom ...

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court really doesn't like arbitration.  It doesn't matter that Congress enacted the Federal Arbitration Act in 1925 specifically to counteract judicial hostility to arbitration.  The Massachusetts court remains hostile, and has shown considerable creativity in striking down arbitration contracts in which consume ...