No Class The Supreme Court's Arbitration Ruling
On Wednesday morning, the United States Supreme Court gave the world a preview of its coming Walmart class action ruling -- and right now things don't look good at all for the legions of female employees and former employees who claim the giant retailer discriminated against them based upon their gender. In AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the Court's five conservative justices banded together to hand Big Business yet another huge legal victory, this time in the context of compelled arbitration clauses, which sets back for decades the rights of individual consumers.Now we can expect every corporation to have fine print that says that when it comes to the quality of their products and services - you will be happy with them because you as a citizen no longer have the right to seek legal recourse for any damage they cause or for suffering because of their lack of quality. Oh yea, corporations rule.
Here is how the Supreme Court described the facts and history of the AT&T Mobility case:
The cellular telephone contract between respondents (Concepcions) and petitioner (AT&T) provided for arbitration of all disputes, but did not permit classwide arbitration. After the Concepcions were charged sales tax on the retail value of phones provided free under their service contract, they sued AT&T in a California Federal District Court.Their suit was consolidated with a class action alleging, inter alia, that AT&T had engaged in false advertising and fraud by charging sales tax on "free" phones. The District Court denied AT&T's motion to compel arbitration under the Concepcions' contract. Relying on the California Supreme Court's Discover Bank decision, it found the arbitration provision unconscionable because it disallowed classwide proceedings. The Ninth Circuit agreed that the provision was unconscionable under California law and held that the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), which makes arbitration agreements "valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract," did not preempt its ruling.
I'll leave it to others to parse the details of Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion, which overturned the 9th Circuit, voided the intended impact of California's consumer law and case precedent, and declared that the Federal Arbitration Act allows corporations to force individuals to adhere to individual dispute arbitration no matter how unjust the results. Suffice it to say that the Court's decision completely defies the very federalism principles which are so often articulated by the very conservative members who agreed Wednesday to strike down a state's effort to level the consumer playing field for millions of its residents. This is as big a pro-business, pro-corporate ruling as we've ever seen from the Roberts' Court -- and it will take explicit Congressional action to overturn it. Paging Lilly Ledbetter!
The money quote of the day comes not from the majority, which contorted itself to lend a helping hand to AT&T, but rather from Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the four dissenting justices. Highlighting the absurdity of the result reached by the AT&T majority, Breyer wrote:
In general agreements that forbid the consolidation of claims can lead small dollar claimants to abandon their claims rather than to litigate. I suspect that it is true even here, for as the Court of Appeals recognized, AT&T can avoid the $7,500 payout (the payout that supposedly makes the Concepcions' arbitration worthwhile) simply by paying the claim's face value, such that "the maximum gain to a customer for the hassle of arbitrating a $30.22 dispute is still just $30.22." What rational lawyer would have signed on to represent the Concepcions in litigation for the possibility of fees stemming from a $30.22 claim? In California's perfectly rational view, non class arbitration over such sums will also sometimes have the effect of depriving claimants of their claims (say, for example, where claiming the $30.22 were to involve filling out many forms that require technical legal knowledge or waiting at great length while a callis placed on hold). Discover Bank sets forth circumstances in which the California courts believe that the terms of consumer contracts can be manipulated to insulate an agreement's author from liability for its own frauds by "deliberately cheat[ing] large numbers of consumers out of individually small sums of money." Why is this kind of decision--weighing the pros and cons of all class proceedings alike--not California's to make?
Now, there is no federal arbitration issue pending in the Walmart case. There is no contract clause over which the parties are arguing. There is no relevant state law to apply. Instead, the matter in Wal-Mart v. Dukes focuses upon the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing class-action status. But, still, it's not hard to see the similarities between the two disputes. In the Walmart case, the company is asking the justices to dramatically limit the ability of potential plaintiffs to band together to pursue common claims based upon allegedly illegal conduct. In the AT&T case, the company was asking the justices to dramatically limit the ability of its customers to band together to pursue common claims based upon allegedly illegal conduct.
