Litigation
Cal. Litig. 2023, Volume 35, Issue 3
Content
- California's Commitment To Wage Transparency Comes At a Cost To Employers
- Confessions From An Electronic Platform 2022: Appellate Argument
- Disclosure of Litigation Funding Arrangements: Much Ado About Nothing
- Don't Let Your Client's Bequest Be a Lawsuit
- Editor's Foreword
- Fraud As Hyperreality
- From the Section Chair
- Governmental Entity Litigation: the Mirror Dimension
- New Federal Legislation Raises Dueling Experts: What Olean Might Mean For the Future of Class Certification In the Ninth Circuit
- PAST SECTION CHAIRS & EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
- Q & A WITH JUDGE VINCE CHHABRIA OF THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA
- SECTION OFFICERS & EDITORIAL BOARD
- Smashing Statues: the Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments
- Table of Contents
- The California Supreme Court In Judicial Year 2021-2022: Emerging From the Pandemic
- The Hastings College of the Law Name Change: the Real Deal About the Bad and the Ugly
- Working: Conversations With Essential Workers
- The Supreme Court's Five Arbitration Decisions
THE SUPREME COURT’S FIVE ARBITRATION DECISIONS
Written by Paul Dubow*
Over the past few decades, the United States Supreme Court has issued many arbitration decisions, but rarely has there been more than two in a single session. This year, the Court outdid itself when it rendered five decisions that concerned arbitration.
The decision that substantially affected California jurisprudence, and perhaps the most controversial, was Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana (2022) __ U.S.__ [142 S.Ct. 1906], which determined the arbitrability of representative and individual claims filed pursuant to the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA, Lab. Code, § 2699). PAGA authorizes any "aggrieved employee" to initiate an action against a former employer "on behalf of himself or herself and other current or former employees" to obtain civil penalties that previously could have been recovered only by the State in an enforcement action by the Labor Workforce Development Agency (LWDA). An employee who files such a representative claim under PAGA is entitled to 25% of the recovery.
Many California employers require their employees to sign arbitration agreements and often these agreements require the employee to waive the right to file class or representative claims. Consequently, employers regularly defend PAGA lawsuits by filing a motion to compel arbitration of the employee’s individual claim and a motion to dismiss the representative claim.