Arbitration, in the context of the law of the United States, is a form of alternative dispute resolution. Specifically, arbitration is an alternative to litigation through which the parties to a dispute agree to submit their respective evidence and legal arguments to a neutral third party (the arbitrator(s) or arbiter(s)) for resolution. In practice arbitration is generally used as a substitute for litigation, particularly when the judicial process is perceived as too slow, expensive or biased. In some contexts, an arbitrator may be described as an umpire. Arbitration in the United States' most overarching clause is the Federal Arbitration Act (officially the United States Arbitration Act of 1925). The Act stipulates that arbitration in a majority of instances is legal when both parties, either after or prior to the arising of a dispute, agree to the arbitration. The Supreme Court has taken a pro-arbitration stance across most but not all cases, and the federal government, most recently in 2022, has passed certain exemptions to arbitration agreements. States are also generally prohibited from passing their own laws which the Supreme Court and other federal courts believe limit or discriminate against arbitration. The practice of arbitration, especially "forced" arbitration clauses between workers/consumers and large companies or organizations, has been gaining a growing amount of scrutiny from both the general public and trial lawyers. History Agreements to arbitrate were not enforceable at common law. This rule has been traced back to dictum by Lord Coke in Vynor’s Case, 8 Co. Rep. 81b, 77 Eng. Rep. 597 (1609), that agreements to arbitrate were revocable by either party. During the Industrial Revolution, merchants became increasingly opposed to this rule. They argued that too many valuable business relationships were being destroyed through years of expensive adversarial litigation, in courts whose rules differed significantly from the informal norms and conventions of businesspeople. Arbitration was promoted as being faster, less adversarial, and cheaper. The result was the New York Arbitration Act of 1920, followed by the United States Arbitration Act of 1925 (now known as the Federal Arbitration Act). Both made agreements to arbitrate valid and enforceable (unless one party could show fraud or unconscionability or some other ground for rescission which undermined the validity of the entire contract). Due to the subsequent judicial expansion of the meaning of interstate commerce, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the FAA in a series of cases in the 1980s and 1990s to