Are Arbitration Clauses All Bad, and If So, For Whom? A Look at the NY Times Expose

I teach both Civil Procedure and Business Associations. As a former defense-side commercial and employment litigator, I teach civ pro as a strategy class. I tell my students that unfortunately (and cynically), the facts don’t really matter. As my civil procedure professor Arthur Miller drilled into my head 25 ago, if you have procedure on your side, you will win every time regardless of the facts. Last week I taught the seminal but somewhat inscrutable Iqbal and Twombly cases, which make it harder for plaintiffs to survive a motion to dismiss and to get their day in court. In some ways, it can deny access to justice if the plaintiff does not have the funds or the will to re-file properly. Next semester I will teach Transnational Business and Human Rights, which touches on access to justice for aggrieved stakeholders who seek redress from multinationals. The facts in those cases are literally a matter of life and death but after the Kiobel case, which started off as a business and human rights case but turned into a jurisdictional case at the Supreme Court, civil procedure once again "triumphed" and the doors to U.S. courthouses closed a bit tighter for litigants. 

This weekend, the New York Times published an in depth article about how the corporate use of arbitration clauses affects everyone from small businesses to employees to those who try to sue their cell phone carriers and credit card companies. Of course, most people subject to arbitration clauses don’t know about them until it’s too late. On the one hand, one could argue that corporations would be irresponsible not to take advantage of every legal avenue to avoid the expense of protracted and in some cases frivolous litigation, particularly class actions. On the other hand, the article, which as one commenter noted could have been written by the plaintiffs bar, painted a heartbreaking David v. Goliath scenario.

I see both sides and plan to discuss the article and the subsequent pieces in the NYT series in both of my classes. I want my students to think about what they would do if they were in-house counsel, board members, or business owners posed with the choice of whether to include these clauses in contracts or employee handbooks. For some of them it will just be a business decision. For others it will be a question of whether it’s a just business decision.