I've spent three articles in this series laying out how forced arbitration locks you out of court, hides corporate wrongdoing, and keeps the credit card machine humming. Let me end on the part that gives me hope, because there is a real one. The wall the Supreme Court built has cracks in it — and some of them were made by ordinary people using the corporations' own weapon against them.
The counterstrike: mass arbitration
Here's the beautiful irony. Corporations wrote clauses that said: you cannot sue us as a group; you must bring your claim alone, one at a time, in individual arbitration. For years that was a shield. Then plaintiffs' lawyers read it back to them literally — fine, we'll do exactly that — and filed tens of thousands of individual arbitration claims at the same time.
And it turned out the companies had built a trap for themselves. Because in consumer and employment arbitration, the company that wrote the clause pays the bulk of the filing and arbitrator fees — often thousands of dollars per case. When 5,010 DoorDash drivers each filed an individual arbitration, as their contracts demanded, DoorDash suddenly faced millions of dollars in fees before a single case was even decided. A federal judge told DoorDash, essentially, this is the system you built and insisted on — now live in it. In 2024 alone, mass-arbitration campaigns filed on the order of 280,000 individual claims at the American Arbitration Association. Amazon, faced with the math, simply dropped the arbitration clause from its consumer terms and sent people back to court — the opposite of everything the strategy was supposed to achieve. The companies had spent a decade insisting everyone must arbitrate individually. When everyone did, they suddenly discovered the virtues of a class action.
I won't oversell it. The arbitration providers are already rewriting their rules to blunt mass arbitration — new fee structures and "batching" procedures designed to protect their corporate clients from the consequences of their own clauses. The weapon works, but the other side is adapting. Still: for the first time in a decade, the people who built the wall are the ones asking for a truce.
The proof that carve-outs work
There's a second crack, and it's a template. In 2022, after the #MeToo movement, Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act — banning forced arbitration for those specific claims. It sailed through a divided Congress with broad bipartisan support. Overnight, survivors got their day in open court back.
That matters far beyond harassment cases, because it proves the whole thing was always a choice. For years we were told forced arbitration was just how the law works, an immovable feature of the Federal Arbitration Act. Then Congress carved out one category of claims in an afternoon, and the sky did not fall. If it can be done for sexual-harassment claims, it can be done for wage theft, for consumer fraud, for civil-rights violations. The FAIR Act would do exactly that across the board. The 2022 law is the proof of concept sitting right there.
The hypocrisy a state can attack today
Now here's the part that's squarely in an attorney general's wheelhouse, and it's my favorite, because it catches the industry playing both sides of the same table.
The companies that force you into arbitration when you have a claim against them turn right around and run to court when they want to collect a debt from you. Debt buyers and collectors file hundreds of thousands of collection lawsuits in ordinary courts every year — using the public court system, with its power to garnish wages and seize accounts, the moment it serves them. Arbitration is only "the fair and efficient forum" when it protects the company. When the company is the one on offense, the courthouse it locked you out of is suddenly wide open.
That contradiction is a pressure point. A state can insist on consistency: if your contract sends the consumer's claims to arbitration, maybe the company's collection claims belong there too — or maybe the arbitration clause is the unconscionable, one-sided instrument it looks like. Minnesota's own courts and its attorney general can press that argument, case by case, and its legislature can write it into law.
What Minnesota can actually do
The Supreme Court's rulings limit what any one state can do to ban these clauses outright — the Federal Arbitration Act preempts a lot. But "limited" is not "nothing," and here is the real agenda:
Transparency. Require companies that impose arbitration on Minnesotans to report the outcomes — who wins, how often, and whether the "neutral" is a repeat player with ties to the company. Sunlight is the one thing the secret system cannot survive.
Conflict and conduct standards. Set real disclosure and neutrality rules for arbitrations seated in Minnesota, so what happened in my own case — an arbitrator working for the other side — is disqualifying, not routine.
End the both-ways game. Use the state's litigating power to attack the debt-collection hypocrisy and the equitable-estoppel abuse, where companies that never signed a contract with you invoke someone else's clause to drag you into the dark.
Procurement leverage. The state spends billions. It can decline to contract with vendors who bury forced arbitration in their consumer and worker agreements, and reward those who don't.
Champion the federal fix. The FAIR Act is the clean solution, and the 2022 carve-out proves Congress can pass one. Minnesota's next attorney general should be its loudest advocate.
I wrote a whole book about how this wall got built. I'll end this series with the thing the book builds toward: walls come down. This one is already cracking — struck by workers filing 280,000 claims at once, by a Congress that carved out a path in 2022, by judges finally asking questions they wouldn't ask a decade ago. The corporations wrote the rule that you must fight them one at a time. It turns out that when enough people do exactly that, all at once, the whole rigged court starts to shake.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Drawn from David J.S. Madgett's book The Rigged Court (2026). Mass arbitration: the roughly 280,000 individual claims filed at the American Arbitration Association in 2024, and the AAA's 2024 mass-arbitration rule changes, as documented in the book and AAA materials; the DoorDash mass-arbitration episode involving 5,010 drivers and the resulting judicial rulings on filing-fee obligations (N.D. Cal., 2020); and Amazon's 2021 removal of the arbitration clause from its consumer terms following mass-arbitration pressure. The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 (Pub. L. 117-90, effective March 2022; 9 U.S.C. §§ 401–402). The Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (FAIR) Act as the proposed general restoration of court access for consumer, employment, civil-rights, and antitrust disputes. Federal Arbitration Act preemption, 9 U.S.C. § 1 et seq., as construed in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333 (2011). Debt-collection litigation volume and the arbitration-vs-court asymmetry as documented in the book and consumer-law literature.
Mass-arbitration claim counts, the DoorDash and Amazon episodes, and debt-collection volumes are as compiled in the cited book and secondary sources, characterized rather than re-derived from primary dockets this pass. The FAIR Act is proposed legislation, not enacted. Commentary, not legal advice. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.