Unsettled questions of law regarding arbitration were before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in a case arising from an investor’s multimillion-dollar loss with Bear Stearns, now JPMorgan Securities, after the companies’ 2008 merger.
A federal judge answered them with “extreme” deference to the arbitration board, which had sanctioned Laurence Stone and thrown out his $7.6 million claim. U.S. District Judge Legrome D. Davis looked to recent opinions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and chose to set a high bar for evidence of an arbitrator’s partiality and chose to set a stringent standard for a petitioner’s waiver of his right to raise claims against the board after its decision.
