In her recent post Supreme Court Orders Additional Briefing in Hall Street, Moritz Law School Professor Professor Sarah Cole at Indisputably Dot Org worries that the Supreme Court might punt the issue squarely placed before it in Hall & Associates -- whether parties to an arbitration agreement may expand judicial review of arbitration awards -- and decide the issue on a narrow common law ground, thus creating more, rather than less, uncertainty for parties wishing to design the best conflict resolution vehicle for their particular dispute. 

(sorry for the run-on sentence grammarians)

The heart of Professor Cole's concerns is quoted below.  The questions from the Supreme Court giving rise to those concerns may be found in the linked post above.

(our earlier posts on the case -- which we referred to as the "Mattel" -- are here and here)

It may be that the[ Court is] considering whether substantive judicial review provisions contained in an agreement among parties transforms what the parties think is arbitration into a procedure governed by common law (contract law) rather than the FAA.

If that is the case, then the question becomes whether parties can ask courts to review their contracts on grounds that courts normally don’t use to review contracts. Then, the district court judge would have to look at whether he or she had authority to grant the parties’ request — in past cases, courts have used their inherent authority to grant or deny such non-traditional requests.

But, because courts’ inherent authority is discretionary, courts might reject the parties’ requests. That level of uncertainty might doom these kinds of agreements.