
http://publicjustice.net/blog/important-new-book-proves-federal-arbitration-act-badly-distorted-by-supreme-court
This post examines a recently published book by an extraordinary law professor, Imre Szalai, who has gone back through the papers of the three men who drafted and lobbied for and pushed the Federal Arbitration Act. In painstaking historical detail, reviewing all sorts of primary materials, he establishes convincingly that the FAA was never intended to (a) apply to employment contracts at all; or (b) apply to take-it-or-leave-it contracts. This book is an important development in the historical scholarship on the Act, and demonstrates conclusively that the FAA has been distorted and mis-shaped by the U.S. Supreme Court in recent decades. The Act now covers millions of people and transactions that it was never intended to address.
The advocates of forced arbitration are literally on the wrong side of history – the Court’s decisions fly in the face of what the authors and supporters of this statute had intended.
Paul Bland
Senior Attorney, Public Justice
Of Counsel, Chavez & Gertler
On Twitter @PblandBland