Now that Justice Gorsuch is confirmed and can take the open seat on the Supreme Court, maybe SCOTUS can move forward on the cases about whether employers can make employees waive their right to class actions in an arbitration agreement.  (Btw, here’s a nice SCOTUSblog piece on Gorsuch’s arbitration decisions.)  In the meantime, California’s high court has decided a similar arbitration issue that seems likely to be the subject of a future cert petition.  In McGill v. Citibank, issued April 6, a unanimous California Supreme Court held that consumers cannot validly waive their statutory right to injunctive relief under California law, and found that the FAA did not preempt that result.

The case involves a woman who purchased a “credit protector” plan from the credit card issuer.  She felt the credit card did not keep its end of the bargain when she lost her job.  Although she had agreed to arbitrate claims and had waived representative or class actions, she started a putative class action in California state court alleging violations of multiple California consumer statutes.  Part of the relief she sought was an injunction preventing the credit card from continuing to violate California statutes.  (The parties agreed that the arbitration waiver prohibited the consumer from obtaining injunctive relief in any forum, not just arbitration.)

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