How can you appeal the arbitration in court? Pretty sure you agree (when signing away your rights) that you will hold the arbitration result to be binding and you give up any potential court remedy. IANAL though.

In particular I have in mind issues of law. Things like whether a business should be allowed to withhold deferred compensation from an ex-employee who takes them to an arbitrator. Or whether a bonus for the previous year, already announced, is deferred compensation or future compensation, and therefore cannot be withheld after a layoff early the next year. Obviously some of these things are policy issues to be settled statutorily, but some also are exactly the sorts of issues to be settled by courts in the absence of statutory law, and some may involve invalidating unconstitutional statutes or parts of them.

Appeals of procedural matters also should be allowed, naturally. And procedural errors in ascertaining the facts of the case should cause de novo arbitration (or removal from arbitration and into a jury trial, if the arbitrators insist on making the sort of procedural errors that call their fact finding into question). Otherwise, fact-finding by arbitrators should not be subject to appeal, as allowing them to so be would greatly diminish the utility of arbitration.

Another thing to appeal would be the method of selection of arbitrators, the validity of their credentials, etc. But there should be fairly high bars to these (not sure how to construct them).

I believe they were talking about an alternate world where arbitration decisions would be appealable, not the world we live in.

Are you sure? https://law.freeadvice.com/litigation/appeals/arbitration_ap...

Granted, the appeals are unlikely to succeed, but perhaps that is because arbitration typically has an approximately fair outcome? Appeals of typical court cases aren't likely to succeed either, but we don't say that court is therefore unfair.

Yes, I'm sure, because I read your link, which says that you can't appeal the facts of the case or the merits of the decision, you can only appeal the process, which, in its own words, provides "a high standard of deference to the arbitrator."

You're generally not going to be able to appeal either of those things in court, either, is my point.

It may be your point, but it isn't the point under debate. We are talking about whether or not the courts provide a check/balance for the decisions of the arbitration system.

They do not.

What makes the most sense is that both sides have the option to accept arbitration before any trial starts. This way, routine cases can be dealt with in arbitration, and more complicated ones at trial.

What needs to be avoided is

* people being pressured into arbitration in return for something (e.g. Accept arbitration or don't get a job) * people opting into/out of arbitration based on rulings. So, no deciding to move to arbitration because you don't like a judge, nor deciding to go for a trial if arbitration isn't going your way.