As the new year begins, this is a good time to recap two of the major Supreme Court decisions from the past year impacting class action law, and to look ahead to a couple big decisions on the horizon.
Looking Back
Arbitration and Class Actions
First, in Epic Systems Corporation v. Lewis, the Court…
In a published decision issued yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that collective claims for alleged breaches of fiduciary duty under ERISA were not subject to the arbitration agreements in plaintiff employees’ employment contracts. Instead, since those claims were brought for the benefit of the ERISA plans in which the…
We’ve been monitoring the appellate battles over the enforceability of class- and collective-action waivers in the employment context since September 2016, when we pondered whether circuit splits would land the issue in the Supreme Court. Since then, our colleagues in the Labor and Employment practice at McGuireWoods have supplied interim reports on the Supreme…
Los Angeles labor and employment litigators Michael Mandel and Amy Beverlin bring us perspective on three class-action waiver cases currently awaiting decision by the Supreme Court, as well as a potential path forward for class-action waivers in employment contracts.
Everyone is talking about the future of class-action waivers in employment arbitration agreements after the Supreme…
It is our distinct pleasure to call attention to this piece in BNA’s Class Action Report, authored by McGuireWoods associate Arsen Kourinian. It’s well worth the few minutes it will take you to read.
Last week, David S. Reidy provided his analysis of the California Supreme Court’s recent decision invalidating an arbitration and class waiver provision in a credit card customer agreement. We jumped at the chance to republish his McGuireWoods Legal Alert here.
On April 6, the California Supreme Court issued the latest in an ongoing series of…
As recently reported by our colleague Brennan Bolt in one of our sister blogs, Labor Relations Today, the Supreme Court has answered a question I posed a few months ago by granting cert in not one, not two, but three cases involving the enforceability of class/collective action waivers in employment agreements. These…
The long-running battle over collective action waivers in the arbitration clauses of employment agreements continues to rage in the Courts of Appeals. Two recent decisions (and the cert petitions filed in their wake) may well lead the Supreme Court to consider once again the thorny relationship between the class/collective action mechanism and federal arbitration law.…
Charlotte litigation and regulatory partner Joshua Davey provides an update on the many varied comments submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in response to the new rule it proposed in May prohibiting class action waivers in arbitration clauses.
Hat tip to our sibling blog, Subject to Inquiry, for such timely coverage.
Houston law professor D. Theodore Rave’s new paper Settlement, ADR, & Class Action Superiority (forthcoming from the Journal of Tort Law) contains an interesting insight about class action practice: when you get right down to it, there is little functional difference between (1) a class action settlement, (2) an AT&T "gold-plated" arbitration clause…
