Originally from Dispute Resolution Journal

In England, beginning some 400 years ago, the courts held that pre-dispute arbitration agreements are revocable. The reasons, we are told, were that the compensation of judges depended on the volume of litigation, and arbitrators were competitors.1 The antipathy of the English courts toward arbitration spilled over into America.2 Despite the passage of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) in 1925, the adoption of the Uniform Arbitration Act in 1955, and decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court in a number of cases,3 all upholding the enforceability of pre-dispute agreements to arbitrate, some courts still have not gotten the message and continue to insist on trying to find ways to thwart such agreements—sometimes with potentially serious adverse consequences. Such a case is Kloss v. Edward D. Jones & Co.4