Merit Insurance Company v. Leatherby Insurance Company A/K/A Western Employers Insurance Company

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that, although the arbitrator's failure to disclose the fact that one of the parties to the arbitration was his former employer violated governing legal and ethical standards for arbitrators, it did not constitute \evident partiality\
• observing that the rules of arbitration “are not the proper starting point for an inquiry into an award’s validity under [the FAA]” because the AAA Rules “do not have the force of law”
• remarking that “[although it is difficult to extract from the cases more than a mood, the mood is one of reluctance to set aside arbitration awards for failure of the arbitrator to disclose a relationship with a party.”
• declining to set aside an arbitration award pursuant to Rule 60(b) where there was no evidence that an arbitrator’s previous relationship with a party “created a substantial danger of an unjust result.”
• “Notwithstanding the broad language of section 18, no one supposes that either the Commercial Arbitration Rules or the Code of Ethics for Arbitrators requires disclosure of every former social or financial relationship with a party or a party’s principals.”
• failure to disclose business relation many years before the arbitration does not compel vacatur of award

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).