The Arbitration Clause as Super Contract

by Drexel Law's Richard Frankel.  The abstract says in part:

judicial reliance on the federal policy favoring arbitration unfairly deprives litigants of access to the courts by pushing cases into arbitration that do not belong there. By creating special rules that favor arbitration and that deviate from state contract law, courts are enforcing arbitration agreements in situations where they would not enforce other agreements. This article questions the basis for the federal policy favoring arbitration and identifies several areas in which courts are relying on it to over-enforce arbitration clauses. Because the original purpose of the Federal Arbitration Act was to make arbitration clauses just like other contracts, this article proposes that courts should not rely on a poorly-conceived federal policy favoring arbitration, but instead should apply general contract principles to arbitration clauses. Doing so best ensures that litigants are not unfairly forced into arbitration in situations where they never agreed to it.

Separately, Frankel testified before the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

“A lot of corporate wrongdoing involves cheating consumers out of small amounts of money, but doing that across thousands or millions of people, so that the company makes huge amounts of money,” Frankel said. “What it does is ensure that instead of arbitration being an alternate form of dispute resolution, it guarantees that consumers have no forum at all.”