I wrote a book about this because I could not stop being angry about it. It's called The Rigged Court, and its argument is simple: the most important constitutional right you have lost in your lifetime, you lost without a vote, without a court ruling in your own case, and almost certainly without ever knowing it happened. You lost it to a clause in the fine print — the same fine print I wrote about earlier in this series, the contracts nobody reads and nobody can refuse.
The clause is called forced arbitration, and here is what it does.
What the clause actually does
Right now, as you read this, you are almost certainly bound by dozens of mandatory arbitration agreements. Your cell phone contract has one. Your credit card agreement has one. Your bank account, your streaming services, your internet provider, your car loan, your gym membership — all of them contain a few paragraphs, written in language you were never expected to read, saying that if the company wrongs you, you give up your right to sue in court. No judge. No jury. No public trial. Instead, your dispute goes to a private arbitrator — often chosen from a roster the company had a hand in, paid in a system the company designed, who will see that company's lawyers again and again in future cases, and who owes you nothing but a closed-door hearing.
And stapled to nearly every one of those clauses is a second one: a class-action waiver. It says that even in arbitration, you must fight alone — you cannot join the hundred or the hundred thousand other people the company wronged in the exact same way. One person, one private room, against a corporation with unlimited lawyers.
The scale is almost hard to believe
This is not a niche problem for a few unlucky people. More than 85 million American workers are bound by forced arbitration in their jobs, and the number of consumers bound by it runs into the hundreds of millions — effectively every adult in the modern economy. And "just don't sign" is not an answer, because there is nowhere to go. Four wireless carriers control about 95 percent of the mobile market; all require arbitration. A handful of banks hold nearly half of all deposits; all require arbitration. Three networks — Visa, Mastercard, and American Express — run about 96 percent of card transactions, and the issuers on them universally require arbitration. To "refuse" forced arbitration, you would have to live with no phone, no bank account, no credit card, and no job. You are free to opt out of the twenty-first century.
How a 1925 law for merchants swallowed the Seventh Amendment
Here's the part that should make you angry too. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases. The Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 was a narrow law, passed so that merchants of roughly equal bargaining power could agree to resolve their commercial disputes privately instead of clogging the courts. It was never meant to let a bank strip a retiree of her right to sue by burying a clause on page nine of an agreement she couldn't negotiate and couldn't decline.
Then, starting in 2011, the Supreme Court turned that narrow merchant statute into a wall. In AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333 (2011), the Court held that the Federal Arbitration Act overrides state laws that had protected consumers from class-action waivers — a case that started over $30.22 in sales tax on a "free" phone. Two years later, in American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant, 570 U.S. 228 (2013), the Court made the injustice mathematical: it enforced a clause even where the cost of proving an individual claim ($100,000-plus in expert analysis) dwarfed the claim's value ($12,000–$38,000). Justice Kagan's dissent called it a betrayal — "Equal justice under law," she noted, unless justice costs more than your claim is worth. Then in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 584 U.S. 497 (2018), the Court told tens of millions of workers they could not band together to challenge shared wage theft. Justice Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench and called the decision "egregiously wrong."
The same five justices formed the majority in every one of those cases. And behind them, in case after case, stood the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose amicus briefs prevail in something like 70 percent of the Supreme Court cases it enters — and in the arbitration cases, higher still. This wall was built on purpose.
Why it matters even if you never sue anyone
You might think: I'm never going to sue my bank, so who cares? Care, because the right to go to court is what makes every other consumer protection real. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, the wage-and-hour laws, the anti-fraud statutes — all of them depend on people being able to enforce them. A right you cannot enforce is a right on paper. When the courthouse door is quietly locked, the law behind it becomes a suggestion, and the company on the other side knows it. Forced arbitration doesn't just take away your day in court. It removes the one thing that made a corporation afraid to cheat you in the first place.
What we can do
Say plainly what happened. The first job is simply telling people that this clause exists and what it took from them. A right nobody knows they lost is a right nobody will fight to get back. This whole series exists to make the invisible visible.
Back the federal fix. The FAIR Act would restore your right to choose court over arbitration for consumer, employment, civil-rights, and antitrust disputes. It is the clean solution, and it deserves a Minnesota delegation that fights for it.
Use every lever a state still has. The Supreme Court's rulings limit what any one state can do — but not to zero, as the next pieces in this series will show. Minnesota can refuse to do business with the worst offenders, demand transparency, and stop letting companies play the game both ways.
You have a constitutional right to a jury of your peers. It was taken from you in the fine print, by a 1925 law about merchants, one Supreme Court decision at a time. The first step to getting it back is knowing it's gone.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Drawn from David J.S. Madgett's book The Rigged Court (2026) and the underlying authorities. Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U.S.C. § 1 et seq. (1925). Supreme Court decisions, verified via CourtListener: AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333 (2011); American Express Co. v. Italian Colors Restaurant, 570 U.S. 228 (2013); Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 584 U.S. 497 (2018) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting, reading from the bench). Market-concentration figures (wireless carriers ~95%; card networks Visa/Mastercard/American Express ~96% of transactions; deposit concentration) and the "more than 85 million workers" bound by forced arbitration are as documented in The Rigged Court, drawing on Economic Policy Institute and industry data. U.S. Chamber of Commerce amicus success rate as documented in the same. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the civil jury-trial right; the class-action-waiver mechanism is standard in consumer and employment arbitration clauses.
Market-share and 85-million figures are as compiled in the cited book and secondary sources, not re-derived from primary data this pass; they are widely reported and directionally well established. This is commentary and advocacy, not legal advice. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.