Contractual Arbitration, Mandatory Arbitration, and State Constitutional Jury-Trial Rights

PROFESSOR JEAN STERNLIGHT believes that courts should be more reluctant to enforce arbitration agreements than they are to enforce contracts generally. In other words, she believes that contract law's standards of consent are not as high as the standards of consent that should be applied to arbitration agreements. This belief puts her at odds with the Federal Arbitration Act ("FAA"), which requires courts to enforce arbitration agreements "save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract," and with the Supreme Court, which continues to recognize that the FAA places arbitration agreements "upon the same footing as other contracts."