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Hiro N. Aragaki EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ARBITRATION * Hiro N. Aragaki Despite talk of a “federalism revival,” state law is quietly losing ground in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the arbitration area is no exception. For as currently interpreted by the lower courts, the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) is on course to preempt a vast array of legislation that serves important public interests but that is only tenuously related to arbitration. The Court has implicitly endorsed this trajectory in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion (decided as this Article went to press), leading many to abandon hope of a principled judicial response to this mounting problem of overpreemption. In this Article, I offer a new model for thinking about the extent to which the FAA should preempt state laws that do not target arbitration for special regulation but that are also not general enough to escape preemption under settled doctrine. I argue that the current predicament of overpreemption should be understood less as a symptom of the law’s rabid favoritism toward arbitration (as is commonly supposed) and more as a symptom of a basic misapprehension of the FAA’s latent principle of nondiscrimination. Contrary to popular belief, that principle does not demand the impossible feat of placing arbitration agreements on the “same footing” as all other agreements. Instead, it seeks the more modest goal of leveling the playing field between arbitration and litigation—or, as I put it here, equal opportunity for arbitration. I illustrate how a more sophisticated engagement with the logic of equal opportunity can help lower courts fulfill the FAA’s nondiscrimination mandate without inevitably displacing state law just because it adversely impacts arbitration agreements. Considering controversial examples from the recent past, I conclude with concrete guidance for how my proposed model might be implemented in practice. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1190 I. SUMMARY OF THE ANTIDISCRIMINATION MODEL OF FEDERAL ARBITRATION ACT (FAA) PREEMPTION ....................................................................................... 1194 A. The Existing FAA Section 2 Preemption Paradigm ........................................ 1195 * Assistant Professor of Law & Ethics, Fordham University Graduate School of Business Administration (2007–11); Associate Professor of Law, Loyola Law School (Los Angeles) (2011–present). For their extremely helpful feedback on earlier drafts, I thank Janet Alexander, David Horton, Allan Ides, Alexandra Natapoff, Thomas Rowe, Aaron Sussman, Michael Waterstone, and participants at the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum held at Stanford Law School, June 2011. Jordan Manekin provided superb research assistance. I am also grateful to Dean Donna Rapaccioli and the Fordham University Schools of Business for their generous financial support. 1189 1190 58 UCLA LAW REVIEW 1189 (2011) B. Reinterpreting the Paradigm as an Antidiscrimination Principle .................... 1197 C. The Open Question of Type 3 Preemption ..................................................... 1198 II. TYPE 3 PREEMPTION AND THE PROBLEM OF EQUALITY ............................................ 1200 A. Reconceiving the FAA Preemption Frontier .................................................. 1200 B. Cracks in the Paradigm ................................................................................... 1203 1. Majority View: State Law Preempted Unless It Is Completely General ..... 1204 2. Minority View: State Law Not Preempted Unless It Singles Out Arbitration .......................................................................... 1206 C. Toward a More Sophisticated Model of Type 3 Preemption ........................... 1208 III. DIALECTICS OF EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY ........................................................... 1210 A. Formal Equality of Opportunity and the Requirement of Discriminatory Purpose ............................................................................. 1210 B. Situated Equality and the Problematic Distinction Between Type 2 and Type 3 Laws ............................................................................................ 1218 IV. THE DEEP STRUCTURE OF THE PARADIGM’S EQUAL OPPORTUNITY LOGIC .............. 1223 A. Revisiting the Decline of the Nonarbitrability Doctrine ................................. 1224 B. Arbitration, the “Other” Litigation ................................................................. 1228 C. The Detour From Process to Contract ............................................................. 1235 V. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ARBITRATION ............................................................... 1240 A. Similarly Situated and Treated Similarly: Forum Selection Clauses and Class Action Waivers ............................................................................. 1242 B. Similarly Situated but Treated Differently: Jury Trial Waivers ..................... 1244 C. Differently Situated and Treated Differently: Public Injunctions .................... 1250 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 1254 INTRODUCTION The state of California protects consumers from adhesive contract provi- sions that force them to waive their right to bring class actions.1 A Rhode Island statute voids any clause in a franchise agreement that requires local franchisees to resolve disputes with their franchisors out of state.2 The common law of West Virginia protects parties from waiving fundamental constitutional rights, such as the right to trial by jury, unless the waiver was “knowing and intelligent.”3 It is not entirely obvious what these laws have to do with arbi- tration. None expressly targets arbitration, and only the last affects the parties’ ability to arbitrate substantive matters. The most that can be said about them 1. See CAL. CIV. CODE §§ 1751, 1781(a) (West 2009), preempted by Ting v. AT&T, 319 F.3d 1126 (9th Cir. 2003). 2. See R.I. GEN. LAWS § 19-28.1-14 (1956 & Supp. 2010), preempted by Doctor’s Assocs., Inc. v. Hamilton, 150 F.3d 157 (2d Cir. 1998). 3. Dunlap v. Berger, 567 S.E.2d 265, 277 (W. Va. 2002), preempted by Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc. v. Coe, 313 F. Supp. 2d 603 (S.D. W. Va. 2004). Equal Opportunity for Arbitration 1191 is that they will likely render unenforceable, in whole or in part, some arbi- tration and some nonarbitration agreements alike. So it is somewhat surprising to learn that lower courts are increasingly finding these and similar laws falling within the states’ historic police powers to be in unavoidable conflict with section 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA).4 The inevitable result is that these state laws are all displaced under the well-established doctrine of obstacle preemption, leaving arbitration agreements to be enforced as if these state laws were never in place.5 This means that the California statute, for instance, will continue to prohibit class action waivers but the FAA will render it powerless against class arbitration waivers.6 If this body of case law gains further traction, it has the potential to change the very meaning of what we know as “arbitration”—from a forum that promotes the voluntary self-governance of disputing parties7 to a contractual device for evading state governance. It would be easy to explain these poorly understood developments in terms of broader tectonic movements in the judicial landscape. Erwin Chemerinsky, for example, has observed that conservative judges who have traditionally voted in favor of decentralized government are increasingly voting to preempt state laws perceived as unfriendly to business interests.8 Cass Sunstein discerns the persistence of Lochnerian ideology in far-flung areas of the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence.9 In a similar vein, critics of mandatory binding arbitration have impugned what they see as “judicial activism”10 in the arbitration area—not the familiar, Warren-era activism that brought rogue states into line with national values, but rather a new breed of judicial politics that appears increasingly 4. 9 U.S.C. §§ 1–16 (2006). 5. See infra note 30 and accompanying text. 6. See Ting, 319 F.3d at 1151–52. 7. See Thomas J. Stipanowich, Punitive Damages and the Consumerization of Arbitration, 92 NW. U. L. REV. 1, 1 (1997). 8. See Erwin Chemerinsky, Empowering States When It Matters: A Different Approach to Preemption, 69 BROOK. L. REV. 1313, 1315 (2004) [hereinafter Chemerinsky, Empowering]; Erwin Chemerinsky, An Overview of the October 2007 Supreme Court Term, 25 TOURO L. REV. 541, 548 (2009) [hereinafter Chemerinsky, Overview]; see also Richard H. Fallon, Jr., The “Conservative” Paths of the Rehnquist Court’s Federalism Decisions, 69 U. CHI. L. REV. 429, 429 (2002); Sandra Zellmer, Preemption by Stealth, 45 HOUS. L. REV. 1659, 1671 (2009). 9. See Cass R. Sunstein, Lochner’s Legacy, 87 COLUM. L. REV. 873, 883–902 (1987). See generally G. Richard Shell, Contracts in the Modern Supreme Court, 81 CALIF. L. REV. 433 (1993) (arguing that Sunstein may even underestimate the influence of freedom of contract ideology on the Rehnquist Court’s jurisprudence). 10. See Larry J. Pittman, The Federal Arbitration Act: The Supreme Court’s Erroneous Statutory Interpretation, Stare Decisis, and a Proposal for Change, 53 ALA. L. REV. 789, 830, 837–39 (2002); David S. Schwartz, State Judges as Guardians of Federalism: Resisting the Federal Arbitration Act’s
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