On Friday October 9th our good friends at the University of Missouri have a symposium entitled the Creeping Legalism of Labor Arbitration.  There’s been a lot of discussion recently about whether arbitration is the new litigation, and this program will take that concept a step further.  The line up of speakers is very good, which should result in a great conference and a good symposium edition of the Journal of Dispute Resolution.  For more on the conference go here, and here’s blurb from the conference materials.

For many years, practitioners and scholars intensively debated the extent to which labor arbitration was becoming too legalistic. While little attention was paid to this issue in the 1990s, recent developments have made the “creeping legalism” issue particularly relevant. First, the increased regulation of the employment relationship has placed labor arbitrators in a position to interpret issues of external law when deciding collective bargaining disputes. Second, the proliferation in the use of individual employee rights arbitration, which by nature is more legalistic, might have affected the practice of labor arbitration. To the extent that some of the same players participate in both, labor and employee rights arbitration, one would expect the legalistic character of individual employee rights arbitration to spillover to labor arbitration, and perhaps other forms of alternative dispute resolution. The recent United States Supreme Court’s decision in 14 Penn Plaza LLC v. Pyett, which holds that a bargaining contract provision requiring employees to arbitrate age discrimination claims is enforceable and thus precludes later litigation of such claims, accentuates the importance of this issue.