Federalism and the Arbitration of Consumer and Employment Disputes in the United States and Canada: The Road Not Taken?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many respects, the tale of the arbitration of consumer and employment disputes in the United States and Canada is a similar one. Both jurisdictions were traditionally hostile to arbitration, both jurisdictions had a complete change of heart in recent years, and in both jurisdictions, arbitration is widely used in the consumer and employment sphere. Moreover, in both jurisdictions questions have been asked regarding the fairness of arbitration agreements in consumer and employment contracts due to the inherent power imbalance between consumers or employees on the one hand and businesses or employers on the other. Despite these similarities, the consumer and employment arbitration landscape in each is radically different, whereas consumer and employment arbitration in the US is almost impossible for consumers and employees to avoid; in Canada, the opposite is true. This radical difference results from key differences in each jurisdiction’s understanding of federalism so that whilst Canadian provinces and courts have been able to protect consumers and employees, US states and courts have found themselves hamstrung by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Federal Arbitration Act and the dominance of federal law over state law. This has led to US courts pushing the envelope of the doctrine of unconscionability whilst Canadian courts have found this unnecessary due to provincial regulation. This article analyzes the different paths taken by federalism in each jurisdiction and how that in turn led to almost opposite outcomes for arbitration law north and south of the world’s longest border. Ultimately, the article concludes that in both federalism and arbitration law, Canada and the US each represent the road not taken by the other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".