The big news in the arbitration world this week is the request made to the S.E.C. by Senators Leahy and Feingold to ban the mandatory arbitration of claims made by customers against their brokers.  An excerpt from the New York Times article Dear S.E.C., Reconsider Arbitration, with a link below.

ARGUING that it is wrong to force investors into arbitration when resolving disputes with their brokers, two prominent United States senators have asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to ban the Wall Street practice of requiring customers to sign away their rights to bring their grievances to court. 

Last Friday, Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Russell D. Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat and a committee member, wrote to Christopher Cox, the S.E.C. chairman, asking that it ban mandatory arbitration “in fulfillment of its statutory duty to protect individual investors.”

Arbitration is fine for straightforward disputes involving modest claims, the senators said. But for many investors, the courts are preferable. Arbitration not only lacks a court-supervised discovery process, they wrote, it does not require panelists to follow rules of evidence or provide written opinions justifying their decisions.

for remainder of article, click here.