Christopher Ward Quoted on Morgan v. Sundance, Impact on Arbitration

Foley & Lardner LLP partner Christopher Ward is quoted in the Law360 article, “6th Circ. Opinion Shows High Court Arbitration Ruling’s Reach,” commenting on the impact of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Morgan v. Sundance, in which the court declared that the Federal Arbitration Act’s “policy favoring arbitration” does not mean courts should confer special status on the legal mechanism.

Ward said that this pronouncement changed the game. “What Morgan is saying is you can’t have any special rules that make it easier to arbitrate, and that’s why this federal waiver doctrine is changing,” he explained. “We essentially had a bunch of circuits with a special rule that favored arbitration vis-à-vis waiver arguments, where they weren’t favoring things in different types of cases.”

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