Earlier this week, President Biden signed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, a bill passed by both the House and Senate last month amending the Federal Arbitration Act to ban the enforcement of pre-dispute arbitration clauses for disputes relating to sexual assault and sexual harassment.

For a thorough discussion of the legislation, see this blog post over at Securities Arbitration Alert, by FOI George Friedman (Fordham). As he summarizes, “the new law amends the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) to give the employee or class/collective representative the right to invalidate after a dispute arises predispute arbitration agreements (“PDAA”) or class action waivers covering sexual assault or harassment claims (see the House text).”

It is surely notable that a fractured federal government managed to, in 2022, amend the rarely-amended Federal Arbitration Act.