Category Archives: Arbitration

by Jeff Sovern My coauthor, Paul Kirgis, has posted an excellent response to Alan S. Kaplinsky and Mark J. Levin's comments on the CFPB Monitor on our arbitration study. His response also has the virtue of being briefer than mine.  While Paul's post is worth reading in full, here is my favorite part:  Citizens cannot […]

by Jeff Sovern Alan S. Kaplinsky and Mark J. Levin, in their comments at the CFPB Monitor, wrote about the contract we showed the survey respondents: "The hypothetical card agreement used in the St. John’s study did not even contain an opt-out provision, although a substantial number of arbitration clauses in use today contain such […]

by Jeff Sovern I am pleased to report that Ballard Spahr’s Alan Kaplinsky and Mark Levin have commented on our arbitration study  at their very informative and useful blog, CFPB Monitor  (We’re still in the stage of soliciting comments and hoping to receive useful feedback which we can use to improve the draft, so if […]

by Jeff Sovern Some readers of our blog will no doubt be familiar with Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman from his popular books, What Do You Care What Other People Think? or Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Others will remember him from his service on the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster.  His relevance to […]

by Jeff Sovern As to the eight questions that had right or wrong answers: Only two respondents answered all eight questions correctly out of 663 who answered all eight questions. 117 did not answer any of the questions correctly. That’s more than answered at least half the questions right. If this had been a test […]

by Jeff Sovern Last week I posted the abstract for our study, 'Whimsy Little Contracts' with Unexpected Consequences: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Understanding of Arbitration Agreements. I want to discuss today some of what we learned about respondent awareness of arbitration clauses in the contracts they have entered into. As the abstract noted, we asked […]

by Jeff Sovern Last week I posted the abstract for our study, 'Whimsy Little Contracts' with Unexpected Consequences: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Understanding of Arbitration Agreements.  The abstract observed that many respondents think that form contracts can't strip consumers of certain rights. That conclusion is obvious from the statistical data, but the written comments make the […]

by Jeff Sovern Last week I posted the abstract for our study, 'Whimsy Little Contracts' with Unexpected Consequences: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Understanding of Arbitration Agreements.  But the abstract doesn't come close to capturing all the interesting  findings.  I hope to write more about some of them in the days to come. Here's something […]

by Jeff Sovern Elayne Greenberg, Paul Kirgis, Yuxiang Liu, and I have posted a draft of our article, "Whimsy Little Contracts" with Unexpected Consequences: An Empirical Analysis of Consumer Understanding of Arbitration Agreements, to the web.  Here's the abstract: Arbitration clauses have become ubiquitous in consumer contracts. These arbitration clauses require consumers to waive the […]