Congress is taking up legislation this week that will wipe out arbitration provisions in hundreds of millions of consumer contracts -- for everything from credit-card agreements to cell phones to health-insurance policies, even a contract for the purchase of a kitchen sink. The bill is so sweeping that it wouldn't apply just to contracts consumers may sign in the future. It will cancel arbitration agreements agreed to in the past.
The Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007, sponsored in the Senate by Russ Feingold (D., Wis.) and in the House by Hank Johnson (D., Ga.), is scheduled to be marked up by a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow and could be taken up by the full committee on Wednesday.
This legislation is a top priority of plaintiffs' lawyers, since arbitration keeps big-dollar disputes out of the courtroom. But it's a bad deal for consumers. The law will not make arbitration "fairer"; it will make it go away, because it is very difficult to get two sides of a dispute to agree to much of anything once a dispute has started. That inconvenient reality is one that some of our lawmakers are simply ignoring.....
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