The chargeback mechanism adjudicates over 100 million consumer-business disputes annually, far more than the formal US legal system. It operates as a privately funded, bank-run judiciary with its own rules and low costs, forming an essential foundation of modern e-commerce.

Companies are adopting AI for dynamic pricing and customer service, leading to inconsistent, personalized outcomes. This parallels the injustice of forced arbitration, where secret, non-precedential rulings create an arbitrary system. Both trends undermine the societal expectation that similar situations yield similar results.

Learning from his legal battles at Tesla, Elon Musk is embedding a mandatory arbitration clause in SpaceX's IPO documents. This legal maneuver aims to prevent shareholders from pursuing certain legal claims in court, effectively shielding the company and its leadership from large, public shareholder lawsuits.

California created a legal workaround to forced arbitration for employees. The Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) deputizes an employee to sue their company on behalf of the state. Since the state never signed the arbitration agreement, the case can proceed in court, circumventing the binding clause.

A small group of roughly 20 elite lawyers now argues about half of all Supreme Court cases. These specialists overwhelmingly represent large corporations, creating an echo chamber where justices are constantly presented with a pro-corporate narrative, likely influencing the court's pro-business slant.

Antonin Scalia is famous for his "textualist" judicial philosophy. However, in cases involving forced arbitration, he frequently ignored the text of laws to reach pro-corporate outcomes. This led to legal reasoning that even colleagues found incoherent, demonstrating an ideological preference.

Terms of service are written so expansively that accepting them for one product can waive your legal rights related to entirely different interactions with a company. For instance, Disney argued a Disney+ subscription forced a man into arbitration for a wrongful death suit at a theme park.

Companies are trapped by the dogma of creating 'bulletproof' contracts, a process driven by legal precedent and risk aversion ('nobody got fired for having the lawyers look at this'). This institutional inertia, codified in policies requiring standard terms, prevents the adoption of more flexible, relational contracts, which are often dismissed as 'fluffy' despite being 'radical common sense.'

Contrary to popular belief, the doctrine of shareholder primacy is a recent invention. For most of corporate history, companies were chartered for a specific public benefit, and subverting that mission purely for shareholder profit would have been considered a crime.