Alive But Not Well: Manifest Disregard After Hall Street

Authors

• Kevin P. Murphy, University of Georgia School of Law

Publication Date

2009

Abstract

Arbitration is supposed to make dispute resolution faster and more cost-effective for litigants. To this end, Congress severely limited the ways in which a court can review an arbitrator's decision. But for the last fifty years courts have allowed parties an additional non statutory avenue for challenging arbitration awards. Where an arbitrator makes a decision in manifest disregard of the law, a court may vacate the award. To prove manifest disregard,parties must prove the arbitrator was aware of the law that should govern the dispute, but deliberately chose to ignore it. This often-argued, but seldom successful, claim increases the costs of enforcing arbitration awards. Last year, the Supreme Court's decision in Hall Street Associates, L.L.C. v. Mattel, Inc. settled a circuit split over whether parties could agree to increase judicial review beyond that allowed by the Federal Arbitration Act. The Court held that the statutory grounds were exclusive and parties could not contract for greater judicial review. Since then, another circuit split has developed over whether Hall Street abrogated manifest disregard since that ground is also not enumerated in the Act. This Note argues it did not. The Supreme Court directly addressed manifest disregard without abandoning the doctrine and suggested many possible definitions of the term. Nonetheless, this Note argues that Congress should eliminate manifest disregard because of the costs it adds to arbitration enforcement.

Recommended Citation

Murphy, Kevin P. (2009) "Alive But Not Well: Manifest Disregard After Hall Street," Georgia Law Review: Vol. 44: No. 1, Article 7.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/glr/vol44/iss1/7