Another California Court Does Backflips to Thwart Arbitration and Elevate The Class-Action Device

Keywords: FAA, consumer arbitration agreements, supremacy clause

The hostility of some California courts to arbitration—and their resistance to preemption under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA)—has produced nearly three decades of U.S. Supreme Court reversals. The most recent is AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, which held that the FAA preempted the Discover Bank rule, under which the California Supreme Court had blocked enforcement of consumer arbitration agreements that required individual rather than class arbitration. Last week's decision in Imburgia v. DirecTV, Inc. (pdf) demonstrates that resistance to Concepcion lives on in the California courts, even at the cost of creating a split with the Ninth Circuit on the same issue in the same contract used by the same company.