James M. Gaitis

By James M. Gaitis [See Part I here. ] Because the only valid grounds for vacatur now recognized by the Supreme Court are those grounds found in Section 10 of the FAA, the above statements by the Supreme Court in AT&T Mobility show that the Court in effect was stating that an arbitral failure to at least attempt to apply the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the Court’s hypothetical example would constitute either “misbehavior&#

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By James M. Gaitis Last week’s United States Supreme Court decision in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 2011 WL 1561956 (U.S., April 27, 2011) no doubt will provide arbitration law commentators with ample fodder to debate merits the Court’s opinion as pertains not only to class arbitration but, also, related questions concerning federal preemption under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and the “substantive federal law of ar

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by James M. Gaitis According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, (1) the position and momentum of an object cannot simultaneously be precisely known and (2) even more tantalizing, the more precisely one property (whether position or momentum) can be measured, the less precisely can the other. For those that seek overall clarity as to what is going on at the particle and wave level of physics (and perhaps in their everyday lives), the Uncerta

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By James M. Gaitis With the issuance of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Rent-a-Center, West, Inc. v. Jackson, the foundational principle of party autonomy in arbitration has suffered yet another blow. In essence, and as was fairly and pejoratively described in what may well be Justice Stevens’ last opinion (dissenting, as it was), the majority’s “breezy” and “fantastic” decision in Rent-a-Center, West decrees that that even when a s

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[Ed. note: Following find interesting comments about AT&T v. Concepcion, a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Read more about the case here. These comments were first posted at Paul Lurie’s excellent listserv and we are reprinting them with the author’s permission.] By James M. Gaitis Ultimately, we are faced with at least four different possible outcomes for consumer arbitration provisions containing class preclusion clauses.

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