Judicial Review and the Limits of Arbitral Authority: Lessons from the Law of Contract

The Supreme Court simply stopped talking about the limits of arbitration as a mechanism for the adjudication of legal rights. Once the Court decided that any and all claims could be arbitrated, it funneled everything into the framework of the FAA, with its contractarian approach to arbitration. While it never expressly declared that arbitration of discrimination claims or consumer fraud claims fit within a contractarian model, as a practical matter, those claims were governed by the same rules that governed traditionally contractarian matters such as labor and commercial disputes. Most notably from my perspective, they all received the same extremely deferential standard of judicial review.