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#MeToo without class action
The justices didn’t directly address sexual harassment, which typically is fought in individual lawsuits rather than in class actions. But the ruling seems likely to strengthen the lower courts’ inclination to judge as fully in accordance with existing law the type of mandatory arbitration clause that disallows individual legal action by workers against their employers — such as the one that for decades kept silent a tidal wave of sexual-harassment allegations at Fox News. “When harassment cases are shunted into mandatory arbitration that allows employers to hide patterns of harassment under the rug,” said Emily Martin, general counsel for the National Women’s Law Center, “it allows harassers to continue to harm individual after individual.”
