Court Opinion

ID: 9819864
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 06:41:13.079774+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:38:33.389169
License: Public Domain

Chief Justice SAYLOR,
concurring.
Although I have differences with the rationale set forth in the Opinion Announcing the Judgment of the Court, I support the result for many of the reasons articulated by Judge Hamilton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in his dissenting opinion in Green v. U.S. Cash Advance Illinois, LLC, 724 F.3d 787 (7th Cir.2018). In addition to agreeing with Judge Hamilton’s analysis of Rules 1(A) and 48(D) of the National Arbitration Forum (“NAF”) Code, see id. at 795-96 (Hamilton, J., dissenting), I am aligned with his position that it is not the courts’ role to compensate for the negligence of an entity presenting a form contract in a consumer-oriented setting which this entity knew or should have known could not be enforced on its own terms. See id. at 793. See generally Majority Opinion, at 273, 124 A.3d at 1255-56 (explaining that the arbitration agreement at issue in the present case was executed eight months after the NAF’s decision to withdraw from the field of consumer arbitrations). To the extent that unwanted consequences must attend such a patent drafting error, from my point of view these are more *286justly visited upon the more sophisticated party to which such mistake is most fairly attributable.
Finally, although I certainly recognize the federal and state policies favoring arbitration, I also believe it is important to acknowledge the inauspicious circumstances surrounding the NAF’s decision to forego administering consumer arbitrations, in that the organization entered into a consent decree with a state attorney general after having been sued on the allegation that it colluded with businesses relative to their disputes with consumers. See id. at 794. See generally Note, Nicole Wanlass, No Longer Available: Critiquing the Contradictory Way Courts Treat Exclusive Arbitration Forum Clauses When the Forum Can No Longer Arbitrate, 99 Minn. L. Rev. 2006, 2009 (2015). To the degree that such allegations cannot be discounted, reflexive adherence to the courts’ self-protective preferences for arbitration—particularly relative to agreements which are incapable of enforcement according to their own terms—would be problematic.