I wrote The FAA Should Not Cover Consumer Claims, to appear in The Federal Arbitration Act: Successes, Failures, and a Roadmap for Reform (Richard A. Bales & Jill I. Gross eds., forthcoming 2024 Cambridge University Press). Here is the abstract: Consumer protection laws face a fundamental enforcement issue: because consumer claims are typically for small […]
Category Archives: Arbitration
As regular readers of the blog know, last month some 160 law academics filed with the CFPB a comment supporting the issuance of a new arbitration regulation (disclosure: I served on the drafting committee). Mark J. Levin & Alan S. Kaplinsky of Ballard Spahr recently posted a critique of the law professor comment on the Consumer Finance […]
Rosario Hernandez sued MicroBilt after a verification report the company issued inaccurately stated she was on a government watch list, leading to her being denied a loan. Citing a mandatory arbitration agreement in her loan application, MicroBilt moved to compel, and Hernandez dismissed her court complaint and submitted her claims to the AAA for arbitration. […]
The Center for Justice & Democracy has published a report titled “Kicked Out of Court in 2023 – 50 Cases Showing the Real-World Impact of Forced Arbitration.” The introduction explains: Mistreatment by tech giants like TikTok. Automobiles and appliances sold with dangerous defects. Nude photos posted online by medical offices. Farms and crops ruined due […]
Reuters’s Allson Frankel has the story here, and also reports on industry opposition. The original petition, as well as the comments, can be read here. Here’s an excerpt from the law professor comment (disclosure: I served on the drafting committee): Multiple studies have demonstrated that consumers do not understand arbitration clauses. In contrast, no study […]
Corporate defendants have long pretended that their interests in mandatory, individual arbitration clauses are directed at the fact that arbitration provides an efficient, adequate forum for consumers to vindicate their claims for relief– not in effectively blocking consumers from obtaining any meaningful relief. As more and more plaintiffs have been taking such defendants at their […]
Bloomberg Law’s Evan Weinberger has the story here (may be behind paywall), including a link to the petition. Weinberger later posted on what used to be called Twitter the CFPB’s response to his request for comment. The petition relies heavily on Roseanna Sommers’ study, which we discussed here.
An Uber driver agrees to Uber’s standard form contract, which includes an arbitration clause. The arbitration clause permits drivers to opt out within 30 days, and the driver does so. So the driver can never be forced into arbitration with Uber, right? Wrong. Greg Gauthier recently pointed me to a case from the Eastern District […]
Tim Samples of the University of Georgia – Terry College of Business, Katherine Ireland of the University of Georgia Libraries, and Caroline Kraczon, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have written TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2023). Here’s an excerpt from the article about […]
This week, I received three different emails informing me that companies I interact with had updated their terms and conditions. The ordinary consumer likely deleted these emails, or read them without understanding what they were talking about, but I knew right away that the biggest change was likely about arbitration. And I was right. All […]