CWC Files Brief With Supreme Court Urging Reversal of Second Circuit Decision Imposing Class Arbitration in Sterling Jewelers, Inc. v. Jock

NT Lakis recently filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Center for Workplace Compliance  (CWC) with the Supreme Court in an important arbitration case, Sterling Jewelers, Inc. v. Jock, No. 19-1382 (U.S. July 16, 2020). Our brief urges the Court to review and reverse a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that imposed class arbitration, binding the involved employer and some 70,000 current and former employees, even though the underlying arbitration agreement was silent as to the availability of class procedures.

In Sterling Jewelers, the Second Circuit both misinterpreted the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and ignored Supreme Court precedent in deferring to an arbitrator’s decision to impose class arbitration based on public policy grounds. Among other things, our brief points out that because class arbitration is so fundamentally different from bilateral arbitration, there must be explicit proof that class arbitration was what the parties actually wanted in order to form the necessary contractual basis.

Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.