Recent Posts

Rumors have reached Arbitration Commentaries concerning the recent professional activities and virtual invisibility of our founder and long-time supporter Marc J. Goldstein. It has been said that he is locked in a consuming legal battle on behalf of a European technology client against a once-mighty and still formidable American technology colossus, that the controversy is pending in a federal judicial forum in New York, and that there is as a consequence indeed a measure of truth to the “Litigation” within Marc J. Goldstein Litigation & Arbitration Chambers.   So intensive are the supposed demands of the dispute that Mr. Goldstein has…
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So are we to think that the rightful power of arbitrators has been vindicated as a matter of principle by the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2-1 panel decision reinstating Tom Brady’s four-game suspension? This commentator says no, and if you think this is mainly because my tailgate party for the Buffalo Bills at New England Patriots game on October 2 will be a less lustrous event with #12 maybe off the premises*, you would be only half right. (Come to the party anyway. We start about 11 am). On the question of whether the four-game suspension was discipline…
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Life does sometimes present good second chances. And Arbitration Commentaries aspires to be more like life. Really. So for all of you who spurned your invitations to the April 21, 2016 meeting of the International Arbitration Club of New York, or failed even to be present in New York on the date, you will find linked HERE. the transcript of remarks delivered on that occasion by our supporter and friend Marc J. Goldstein about the prospects for arbitration jurisprudence at the US Supreme Court in the post-Scalia/possibly Garland era. Only one photograph of the event remains in circulation; Arbitration Commentaries…
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What? You have nothing good to read? You been through all the new biographies of Donald Trump but seek something absorbing? Perhaps this space can help. A rumor has reached Arbitration Commentaries that, beginning in the week of May 2, you should be able to read online “Living (Or Not) With the Partisan Arbitrator: Are There Limits to Deliberations Secrecy?” This article has been written by Marc J. Goldstein, a New York attorney (still) and a long-time supporter of Arbitration Commentaries. The online source to read this piece, one surmises, is the website of Arbitration International (http://arbitration.oxfordjournals.org) (last visited April…
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Here in the USA (New York remaining therein until November 2016 and possibly beyond), judicial control over the use of arbitration for class actions is still a hot topic. One aspect of such control, or lack of it, is the question of who (finally) decides — court or arbitrator — whether a particular arbitration clause does indeed permit arbitration to be pursued on behalf of a class of persons alleged by the named Claimant to be in the same circumstances vis-à-vis the Respondent. Not every US corporation has managed to include an enforceable class action waiver in its arbitration clauses…
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We did not really learn very much about arbitration from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in DirecTV v. Imburgia, 136 S.Ct. 463, 2015 WL 8546242 (Dec. 14, 2015). After all, we knew, even before we were reminded by the New York Times, that companies that sell goods and services to consumers using written contracts, in interstate or international commerce, use arbitration clauses that prohibit class or consolidated actions, doing so to foreclose legal challenge to profitable but perhaps dubious business practices. We also knew that the U.S. Supreme Court has mainly condoned such use of class arbitration waivers by…
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