Supreme Court Upholds Arbitration In DirectTV Case

An anonymous reader sends word that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a 6-3 decision that DirecTV’s service agreement barring mass arbitration by its customers must be enforced. The NYTimes reports: "The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that dissatisfied customers of DirecTV in California could not band together in a class action and must instead pursue individual arbitrations. The decision, by a 6-to-3 vote, was the latest in a series of Supreme Court decisions that have made it harder for consumers to go to court to pursue claims of fraud and defective products."

Comments

Re:Barring arbitration altogether?

[Qzukk]

the Supreme Court is so corporate friendly they won't overturn this blatantly unconstitutional practice.

Agreed. It's gotten so bad I'm fully expecting the SCOTUS to shit out a pretzel after it finishes the contortions necessary to explain why Dollar General should be allowed to ignore its contract with the Native American tribe that they signed, agreeing to subject itself to Native American court jurisdiction, without allowing every other "person" to ignore the jurisdiction-setting clause in every single contract in this country.

It'll probably involve something like claiming that because mere humans can only exist in one physical location they must be subject to a jurisdiction no matter where in that country that jurisdiction is, even if it has nothing at all to do with the physical location of the human, while Corporate People exist everywhere and nowhere at once and therefore cannot be subject to any jurisdiction at all except by Their whims and Their whims are allowed to change whenever They feel the jurisdiction They chose has become doubleplusungood, despite what any contract heretofore executed shall claim.

http://indiancountrytodaymedia...

tl;dr: SCOTUS will find a way to justify letting Corporations out of their binding arbitration contracts while keeping the rest of the normal humans stuck in theirs.

Re:"DDOS" the justice system?

[hairyfeet]

Cases like this is what small claims court was designed for. It costs very little to file, you don't need a lawyer, and because its capped at 5K in most places often the corp will just pay up instead of spending the money to argue the case. Its one of the few places where the legal system actually gives an advantage to the little guy and it sounds like where these cases need to be.