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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Karl and I have written about arbitral awards and their potential appealability, and we’ve blogged on the subject several times (most recently here). Here in the Fifth Circuit, it is permissible to write a provision for appeal into an arbitration clause, allowing for judicial review of an arbitral award on a basis other than the extremely limited basis provided by the Federal Arbitration Act or the Texas Arbitration Act. However, not all ju

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The Texas Supreme Court handed down six opinions today; none of them has anything to do with arbitration. Sadly, we’re too busy to discuss any of them at length. We would note, however, that one of the opinions discusses the economic loss rule, and how one goes about asserting it in Texas. Technorati Tags: litigation, Texas Supreme Court, law

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This past Friday, while Karl and I attended the Austin Bar Association’s annual Bench Bar conference, the Texas Supreme Court handed down another mandamus, per curiam opinion reversing trial court and court of appeals decisions not to compel arbitration. The case involved an employee of RLS Legal Solutions (“RLS”) named Amy Cobb Maida (“Maida”) who worked as a sales rep for RLS from 1997 until 2002. As per her employ

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