by Jeff Sovern I have a suggestion for the CFPB relating to arbitration. Many readers will know this background, but for those who don't: in 2010, Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act, which in section 1028 directed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to study arbitration. The statute also authorized the Bureau to regulate consumer financial arbitration […]
Category Archives: Arbitration
by Jeff Sovern Here. [Disclosure: the website is put up by AAJ, which gave St. John's a grant to fund some of my research back in 2015]
Here. It might be behind a paywall, but you can find it on Lexis. I enjoyed and recommend the whole column, but here's an excerpt: Jim Kimberly, an AT&T spokesman, told me that "arbitration is a faster, less expensive, easier means of resolving disputes." * * * For businesses, arbitration is indeed faster, cheaper and […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. Which one do you think consumers are more likely to read? To understand? (HT: ContractsProf Blog)
by Jeff Sovern According to standard readability measures, arbitration clauses require a lot of education to understand. The CFPB arbitration study reported that the average arbitration clause was written at a level that required more than two years of college to grasp. A study that I co-authored found that consumers didn't understand arbitration clauses at […]
by Jeff Sovern That's the inference to be drawn from a must-read article in the NY Times, ‘Scared to Death’ by Arbitration: Companies Drowning in Their Own System. The article points out that arbitrations are taking longer than billed, and companies are refusing to pay arbitration fees. AN ADDITIONAL NOTE: As Allison noted in an […]
Andrea Chandrasekher and David Horton, both of California–Davis, have written Empirically Investigating the Source of the Repeat Player Effect in Consumer Arbitration. Here's the abstract: Policymakers, courts, and scholars have long been interested in whether repeat players enjoy an advantage in forced arbitration. Sophisticated empirical studies of consumer and employment awards reveal that there is indeed […]
Richard Frankel of Drexel has written Corporate Hostility to Arbitration, 50 Seton Hall Law Review (forthcoming 2020). Here is the abstract: In the last 30 years, corporations have aggressively and successfully pushed the Supreme Court to invalidate virtually all state regulation of mandatory arbitration clauses on the ground that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) preempts any […]
Imre S. Szalai of Loyola of New Orleans has written The Prevalence of Consumer Arbitration Agreements by America’s Top Companies, 52 U.C. Davis L. Rev. Online 233 (2019). Here is the abstract: This article present the results of a study that examines the use of arbitration agreements by the top 100 Fortune Magazine-ranked largest domestic […]
Andrea Chandrasekher and David Horton, both of California, Davis, have written Arbitration Nation: Data from Four Providers, 109 California Law Review. Here's the abstract: Forced arbitration has long been controversial. In the 1980s, the Supreme Court expanded the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), sparking debate about whether private dispute resolution is an elegant alternative to litigation or a rigged […]