Wednesday round-up

CONOR MCEVILY JUN 12, 2013 9:52 AM

Court watchers continue to provide coverage of and commentary on Monday’s orders and opinions.

At the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution, Russ Bleemer reports on Monday’s opinion in Oxford Health Plans LLC v. Sutter, in which the Court held that when an arbitrator determines that the parties to an arbitration intended to authorize class-wide arbitration, that determination survives judicial review under § 10(a)(4) of the Federal Arbitration Act as long as the arbitrator was arguably construing the contract.  Sarah Cole weighs in on the case at ADR Prof Blog, observing that “[i]n the short term, the decision may result in more class arbitrations,” but that “[o]ver time . . . parties will redraft their arbitration agreements to explicitly preclude class arbitrations.”

At PLF Liberty Blog, Brian T. Hodges discusses what Monday’s decision in Horne v. Department of Agriculture – in which the Court held that farmers who had been fined for violations of an agricultural marketing order may bring a “takings” claim in a regular federal district court without first paying the fine – might mean for Koontz v. St. John’s River Water Management District, another pending case involving takings issues.  And at JURIST, Julie Deisher reports on Monday’s denial of cert. in Vance v. Rumsfeld, a in which the Court was asked to consider “whether federal courts may entertain damages claims brought by U.S. civilians who have been tortured by the U.S. military.”

Briefly:

• Jessica Dye of Thomson Reuters reports on a pair of class actions that the Court remanded to the lower courts for reconsideration in light of its decision in Comcast v. Behrend, in which it held that the Third Circuit should not have certified a class action when the plaintiffs had failed to show that damages could be accurately measured on a class-wide basis.  “The outcome in both cases,” Dye observes, “could help clarify whether judges will apply Comcast beyond the antitrust arena to product liability and other types of class action cases.”
• Chantal Valery of Agence France Presse interviews Justice Sotomayor on “her unlikely but very American rise from the Bronx to the highest court in the land.”
• And at the Constitutional Accountability Center, Doug Kendall predicts that, “[w]hile its always treacherous to predict the Court’s future actions, given [] authorship statistics, it appears to be a good bet that Justice Kennedy and the Court’s conservatives will have a major say over whether the Court remains faithful to the Constitution’s text and history in some of this Term’s most important cases.”

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