The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021-2022 term is poised to go down as one of its most historic. Its landmark decisions in areas such as abortion access and gun ownership are likely to significantly impact organizations, including HR teams.
In addition to those, the high court issued three decisions concerning arbitration in an employment context. A unanimous court handed down the first, Morgan v. Sundance, Inc.,in May, when the justices rejected arbitration-specific procedural rules created by federal courts.
The case came from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and concerned whether a Taco Bell franchisee waived its right to arbitrate an employee’s wage and hour claims after waiting months to compel arbitration. The 8th Circuit, in a reversal of a lower court’s decision, determined that the employee had failed to show that her employer prejudiced her by acting inconsistently in invoking its arbitration agreement with her.
But the Supreme Court held that the Federal Arbitration Act’s “policy favoring arbitration” did not permit courts to invent arbitration-specific rules such as the prejudice requirement upon which the 8th Circuit relied.
Morgan is a “very narrow ruling,” said Richard Silberberg, partner at Dorsey & Whitney, but it nonetheless showed that the court saw an opportunity to rein in lower courts’ previous rulings with respect to arbitration.
“Lower courts had kind of invented this prejudice requirement,” Silberberg said, adding that he did not expect the...
REUTERS/Eric Lee U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave his own account of conversations he and President Trump had with Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani regarding the IC...