• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.3-35
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• 2017

For recent years, several disputes between Korean consumers and multinational companies have arisen. Since the disputes were big and material that children's safety was at issue, a question started if Korean law properly has protected consumers' rights against multinational companies. While the Korean legal society tried to legislate punitive compensation with this concern, the U.S. Supreme Court reached an interesting case law regarding consumer contracts. A recent trend on consumer contracts in the United States shows that general terms have arbitration clause with class action waiver. As much as international arbitration has worked as the most effective resolution in international commercial disputes, the concept is still foreign and the experts are not approachable to lay individual consumers. However, class action in arbitration can hugely help for lay individual consumers to bring a case before arbitration tribunal. California courts consistently showed the analysis that the practical impact of prohibiting class action in arbitration clause is to ban lay individual consumers from fighting for their rights. However, the Supreme Court held that the arbitration clause shall be enforced as parties agree even if consumers practically cannot fight for their rights in the end. Even though consumer contracts are a typical example of lack of parity and of adhesive contract, the Supreme Court still applies liberalism that parties are equal in power and free to agree. This case law has a crucial implication since Korean consumers buy goods and services from the U.S. and other countries in everyday life. Accordingly, they are deemed to agree on the dispute resolution clauses, which might violate their constitutional right to bring their cases before the adjudication tribunal. This issue could be more important than adopting punitive compensation because consumers' rights are not necessarily governed by Korean law but by the governing law of the general terms and conditions chosen and written by the multinational companies. Thus this paper studies and analyzes the practical reality of international arbitration and influence of arbitration clause with class action waiver with the U.S. Supreme Court and California case laws.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.73-86
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• 2011

Today's arbitrations see themselves as the most effective scheme for dispute resolution in a variety of transactional context. While some kind of ADR system was already introduced in Korea as of 2007 with revision of the Consumer Basic Law, consumers' needs in dispute resolution remain unmet. Recently one consumer arbitration case divides the U.S. Supreme Court. Of course, the result of the case is expected to affect tens of millions of arbitration agreements in the States which has the most developed scheme in consumer arbitrations. While Arbitration clauses in adhesion contracts are not automatically held to be substantively unconscionable, Class action waivers are one of the most controversial issues in consumer arbitration. In this study, with the theoretical background of consumer arbitrations general, and contractual defenses against adhesive contracts, reviewed are U.S. federal courts' attitudes toward certain consumer arbitration agreements including the class arbitration waiver. Moreover, several issues in AT&T case are examined for practical implications for consumer dispute resolution. All of these are expected to initiate further research to find some guidelines for the proper status and operation of consumer arbitration here in Korea.

• THE INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE & LAW REVIEW
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• v.77
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• pp.69-89
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• 2018

The United States of America is one of the most favoring countries in which mandatory pre-arbitration clauses in the form of adhesion contract have been widely recognized and supported by courts and the Federal Arbitration Act. However, after the financial crisis in 2008 and the National Arbitration Forum scandal in 2009, in enacting the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ('Dodd-Frank Act'), Section 1028(a) of the Act requires the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to provide Congress with a report on "the use of agreements providing for arbitration of any future dispute between covered persons and consumers". Section 1028(b) also grants the CFPB the authority to "prohibit or impose conditions or limitations on the use of an agreement between a covered person and a consumer for a consumer financial product or service providing for arbitration of any future dispute between the parties, if the Bureau finds that such a prohibition or imposition of conditions or limitations is in the public interest and for the protection of consumers." Pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB issued a report entitled "2015 Arbitration Study: Report to Congress 2015 (Report)" in March 2015. This paper examines some major legal issues of the Report and makes a few recommendations for Korean financial institutions which entered into the U.S. financial market or has a plan to do so in the near future.