The U.S. Supreme Court’s pro-arbitration trend appears intact after oral arguments Monday in a key case asking whether it should be courts or arbitrators themselves who rule on the enforceability of an arbitration agreement.
Consumer groups say the outcome of the case, Rent-A-Center, West v. Jackson, could determine whether courts have any role in overseeing arbitration clauses in labor agreements, which they see as biased toward employers. Business groups, for their part, don’t want courts second-guessing what they see as validly agreed-upon arbitration agreements.
“If companies win, this really will be a watershed case,” said Deepak Gupta, an attorney for Public Citizen, which asserts that arbitrators rule against consumers 94 percent of the time.
During the past two decades, the high court has generally ruled to strengthen the enforceability of arbitration agreements. On Monday, few justices appeared eager to change that trend, though several seemed to believe that courts should play some role in checking especially egregious agreements. Dallas lawyer Robert Friedman of Littler Mendelson, representing the business side of the case, urged the Court to continue its practice of “sending very, very complicated matters to the arbitrator” rather than the courts
via Law.com – Supreme Court Justices Consider Courts’ Role in Arbitration.
