The Bold Ambition of Justice Scalia’s Arbitration Jurisprudence

Katherine V.W. Stone, Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) – School of Law, has published “The Bold Ambition of Justice Scalia’s Arbitration Jurisprudence: Keep Workers and Consumers Out of Court,” 21 Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal 189 (2017); UCLA School of Law Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper No. 17-41.  In her journal article, Professor Stone examines the implications of the many United States Supreme Court opinions addressing the Federal Arbitration Act that were authored by the late Justice Scalia during the last decade of his life.

Here is the abstract:

Arbitration clauses have become a pervasive feature of modern life. The expanding scope of arbitration has become a cause for alarm amongst consumer and worker advocates, who see it as a judicial roll back of hard-won consumer and worker rights. Justice Antonin Scalia played a key role in the trend by which arbitration has largely displaced the civil justice system for ordinary Americans. Between 2006 and 2016, Justice Scalia authored six important Supreme Court decisions interpreting the FAA – no other Justice came close. Scalia’s singular contributions to arbitration law are implicated in three consolidated cases that are currently before the Supreme Court, and which pose the question of the impact of the FAA on workers’ rights to engage in collective activity to improve their working conditions. This article traces the Justice Scalia’s contributions to arbitration jurisprudence and considers the implications of the edifice he has created by these decisions.

This and other research papers written by Professor Stone may be downloaded for free from the Social Science Research Network.

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