Outsourcing Justice – New Book About Federal Arbitration Act
Paul Bland, Senior Attorney at Public Justice, wrote a piece on Professor Imre Szalai’s new book on arbitration. Here’s what Paul has to say:
http://publicjustice.net/blog/important-new-book-proves-federal-arbitration-act-badly-distorted-by-supreme-court This post examines a recentlypublished book by an extraordinary law professor, Imre Szalai, who has goneback through the papers of the three men who drafted and lobbied for and pushedthe Federal Arbitration Act. In painstaking historical detail, reviewingall sorts of primary materials, he establishes convincingly that the FAA wasnever intended to (a) apply to employment contracts at all; or (b) apply totake-it-or-leave-it contracts. This book is an important development inthe historical scholarship on the Act, and demonstrates conclusively that theFAA has been distorted and mis-shaped by the U.S. Supreme Court in recentdecades. The Act now covers millions of people and transactions that itwas never intended to address.
The advocates of forced arbitrationare literally on the wrong side of history – the Court’s decisions fly in theface of what the authors and supporters of this statute had intended.