In the context of a slightly complicated procedural situation, the Texas Supreme Court made the following ruling earlier today: in a case where a court compels arbitration, the party resisting arbitration files a petition for mandamus challenging arbitration, the petition is denied, the party loses the arbitration, and the party resists confirmation of the award without success, in that case, the party is still able to challenge arbitrability in

Continue reading...

The Texas Supreme Court issued a per curiam mandamus opinion compelling an arbitration this morning in a class action suit which alleges that a home builder built a bunch of houses without shower pans. The opinion is not long, but it quickly dispenses with a number of the common contractual arguments parties raise when seeking to avoid arbitration. In other words, it is a handy primer for this type of arbitrability challenge, offering a sort of c

Continue reading...

We’ve blogged before, on numerous occasions, about McCarran-Ferguson Reverse Preemption of the Federal Arbitration Act. Specifically, we’ve blogged about the Kepka case out of Houston, whereby the Court held that Texas medical malpractice legislation, which holds that an agreement to arbitrate a med-mal case must be signed by both the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s attorney, was legislation to regulate the insurance industry, and

Continue reading...

As the Texas Appellate Law blog has noted, the Texas Supreme Court was busy today, releasing “a slew of 13 opinions.” Many of them, on first blush, look interesting. None of them, however, talks about arbitration. Well, that’s not exactly true. One of the opinions came from a case “almost identical” to last week’s Merrill Lynch arbitration case. The quite short opinion simply states that this week’s Merri

Continue reading...

As you can see, today was a big day at the Texas Supreme Court. The Court handed down three arbitration opinions, as well as a handful of other opinions on other issues. We’ve already blogged about arbitration opinions one and two, but this one is, we think, the most interesting. Today, you see, the Texas Supreme Court refused to adopt concerted-misconduct equitable estoppel as a means by which non-signatories to an agreement to arbitrate c

Continue reading...

In a per curiam arbitrability opinion released today, the Texas Supreme Court held that a fraudulent inducement claim must be arbitrated, if the contract which was allegedly fraudulently induced contained an arbitration clause, even if the party seeking to compel arbitration is not a signatory to that contract. The case involves fraudulent inducement claims by a group of student electricians against a vocational College; they allege that the Coll

Continue reading...

Yesterday, we posted about a Third Court of Appeals opinion where a party seeking to compel arbitration was found to have not established the existence of an agreement to arbitrate. Today, the Texas Supreme Court addresses the same issue but comes up with the opposite result. The case involved claims by investors against their stock broker based on Enron stock losses. In this case, the plaintiffs, who sought to avoid arbitration, signed contracts

Continue reading...

Well, the Texas Appellate Law Blog scooped us on a Third Court of Appeals opinion handed down today in which the Court refuses to compel arbitration under either the TAA or the FAA. We will not simply recap what Mr. Smith has already posted on the subject, but we wanted to make a couple additional points about the interesting opinion. Really, the case is more about motion practice and Texas appellate practice than arbitrability issues. Judge Yele

Continue reading...

Earlier this week, the Fifth Circuit handed down an opinion reversing a decision from the Eastern District of Louisiana which had vacated an arbitral award (link is to .pdf file). The underlying case was a securities fraud action against a stock broker, which the Plaintiffs arbitrated under protest, having challenged the arbitrability of the case from the outset. The District Court, however, forced the parties to arbitrate, and the Defendant stok

Continue reading...

We have not been as diligent as we like to be recently with respect to this blog, due to, well, the practice of law. Anyhoo, as luck would have it, way back on May 24, when we ought to have been blogging but weren’t, the Third Court of Appeals issued a opinion denying a petition for writ of mandamus in an arbitration case. The issue is one that comes up a lot, and it’s an important one. We are just sorry we did not discuss it sooner.

Continue reading...