Yesterday I mentioned that I heard Schwab sued FINRA in federal court for declaratory relief regarding the validity of its class action waiver in the arbitration clause of its customer agreement. Schwab claims that the FAA and the Supreme Court’s decisions in AT&T Mobility and CompuCredit trump FINRA’s rules. You can download the complaint, filed [...]

There appears to be some life left in the “vindication of statutory rights” argument following Concepcion and Stolt-Nielsen after all! The Second Circuit, in In re: American Express Merchants’ Litigation, 06-1871 (2d Cir. 2012), held that a class action waiver in an arbitration agreement can be ruled unconscionable if the plaintiff (here, a merchant) can [...]

Yesterday I reported on FINRA’s enforcement action against Charles Schwab for inserting a class action waiver in its customer PDAAs. Today I hear that Schwab filed an action in federal court seeking a declaratory judgment that it’s class action waiver is lawful. Schwab offered to pay its customers’ arbitration filing fees pending the outcome of [...]

In a very interesting development with implications for the fate of class action waivers in the securities dispute context, FINRA Enforcement filed a complaint today against broker-dealer and FINRA member Charles Schwab for including a class action waiver in its customer agreement.  Schwab had amended its customer agreement to include the class action waiver in October [...]

I would be remiss in my duties as director of the Moritz College of Law if I did not offer my congratulations to the student winners of the annual CPR academic awards — both of whom are members of the Moritz College of Law class of 2011. From our press release: Michael Diamond ’11 wrote [...]

I know this is an ADR board, but ADR programs have clinics too.  If you know any clinicians (or non-clinicians) who might be interested our upcoming program, please forward the announcement for the Southwest Jr. Clinicians Conference below. Have you been a clinician for less than ten years? If so come and join us at [...]

The consensus had been the Consumer Financial Products Board, finally (but perhaps temporarily) able to act since the recess appointment of Richard Cordray as Director, would have too much on its plate to move quickly on its Congressional mandate to study consumer arbitration in financial services agreements. But Cordray was quoted in a Washington Post [...]

Friend of Indisputably, Kristen Blankley, provides this guest post on an two new cell phone apps to keep important information at your fingertips. Who says that the answers to complicated questions arising from negotiation strategy and legal ethics cannot be answered at the tip of your fingers?  Thanks to two recently developed apps, they can.  The first [...]

From the Global Arbitration Review (1/16/12): “The world’s first specialist centre to resolve disputes arising from complex financial transactions has opened in The Hague. PRIME Finance – the Panel for Recognised International Market Experts – was declared open for business today by the Dutch minister of finance, Jan Kees de Jager. It will draw on [...]

Earlier this month, the NLRB ruled that employers may not require employees to consent to the waiver of class rights as part of an employment arbitration agreement. The NLRB’s rationale was that the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Act guarantee employees the right to enforce their provisions through collective action. Now, in Sutherland [...]

I am pleased to share this invitation from Susan Franck (Wash. & Lee): I wish to draw your attention to the Institute for Transnational Arbitration (ITA) and its First Annual Winter Forum in San Francisco. It is the first event of its kind that is designed to drawn together the synergies of serious scholars of [...]

Mark Weidemaier (University of North Carolina) has posted Judging Lite: How Arbitrators Use and Create Precedent. The abstract: Common wisdom has it that arbitrators neither follow nor make precedent, with potentially dire consequences. These include the failure to enforce individual rights and the possibility that, over time, widespread use of arbitration will result in the [...]

Jean Sternlight’s post on the NLRB’s decision in D.R. Horton, Inc. and Michael Cuda cogently summarizes the NLRB’s rationale for treating class waivers differently in the employment context governed by the NLRA than in other FAA contexts. As she points out, this decision is controversial. Because it runs counter to a steady current of Supreme Court [...]

The annual CPR awards for the best ADR papers, books, and projects were recently announced.  Kudos to my friend and ASU colleague Roselle Wissler for winning the Professional Article category with her article Court-Connected Settlement Procedures: Mediation and Judicial Settlement Conferences, 26 Ohio St. J. on D.R. 23 (2011) .  Kudos are also due to Mizzou law prof [...]

In a Federal Register notice issued last week, the SEC published for public comment a proposal to amend Rule 13201 of the FINRA Code of Arbitration Procedure for Industry Disputes to expressly preclude employees of FINRA members from arbitrating collective actions arising under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act or the Equal [...]

We have decided to give some more time for interested schools to apply host the next WIP conference.  Please consider applying. The AALS Dispute Resolution Section is seeking a host for the 6th Annual Works-in-Progress Conference in the fall of 2012. The WIP Conference has proven to be quite successful, and it has quickly become one of [...]

Just as some states are giving up on their foreclosure mediation programs (see my note on the demise of Florida’s program here), the Department of Justice is urging greater investment in foreclosure mediation. Through the report of its Access to Justice Initiative, DOJ makes a number of recommendations, including increased research and evaluation of state [...]

Earlier today, I learned that Raymond Shonholtz died.  He was a founder and president of the San Francisco Community Boards.  It would be hard to overstate the role these community boards played in the evolution of mediation in the United States, not just the small claims versions thereof, but also many of the facilitative and [...]

Paul beat me to the punch, but I could not agree more with him that the Court’s decision in Compucredit v. Greenwood is unsurprising. The true mystery of the case is that the Court took it in the first place. Until Congress decides to make it clear that a particular statutory claim cannot be arbitrated, [...]

In a thoroughly unsurprising decision, the Supreme Court today held in CompuCredit Corp. v. Greenwood that claims under the federal Credit Repair Organizations Act are arbitrable. CROA contains a disclosure rule requiring that consumers be notified that they “have a right to sue a credit repair organization that violates the Credit Repair Organization Act.” The [...]