Mandatory arbitration clauses hidden in the fine print of credit card, banking, cell phone and payday loan contracts prevent consumers from access to the judicial system when a dispute arises, and make class action lawsuits over pervasive injustices impossible. Because the outcomes of arbitration cases are typically not public, we didn’t know a lot about the scope of this system until this week. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, acting under a mandate from the Dodd-Frank Act, released a report to Congress on mandatory arbitration, one of the first empirical analyses of the practice.

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