For roughly 25 years franchisors have fought hard in courtrooms, in the lobbies of Congress, and at the bargaining table to ensure that that disputes with franchisees would be resolved by arbitration. In large part, they have succeeded. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed both the enforceability of arbitration agreements and the desirability of arbitration itself, despite hostile state statutes and stubbornly recalcitrant state courts. Congress has turned a distracted, if not an entirely deaf ear to the efforts of franchisee- and trial lawyer-pressure groups to take franchise agreements outside the protection of the Federal Arbitration Act for all practical purposes. And arbitration provisions have become a standard term in franchise agreements.
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