the Zealous

PayPal has upgraded its class action waiver and arbitration provisions for the mass-arbitration era. The result is one of the most heavily fortified consumer arbitration clauses out there - supercharged to meet the mass arbitration threat that PayPal has faced in recent years.

Before you can file anything, you or PayPal has to mail the other side a completed Notice of Dispute by certified mail, signed with your original handwritten signature and your counsel's if you have one. A 60-day good-faith negotiation window follows, with an optional settlement conference you must personally attend. Completing this is a "condition precedent to initiating arbitration," and a court can enforce it by staying your arbitration and freezing fees.

This from the company that built itself on taking friction out of payments. This is a filter, aimed at mitigating the onrush of thousands of identical demands.

In 1923, a young Boston lawyer named Archibald MacLeish, who finished first in his class at Harvard Law, was made partner at his firm. He resigned the same day to move himself and his family to Paris.

This is why.

Before Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman to sit on the federal bench, she was the lawyer the segregationists least wanted to see walk into their courtroom.

Motley spent two decades as a front-line litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where Thurgood Marshall hired her as the organization's first female attorney while she was still finishing at Columbia Law School. She was the only woman on the LDF team that wrote the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education. She then spent years turning Brown from a principle into admissions letters, courtroom by hostile courtroom.

She argued ten cases before the United States Supreme Court and won nine. That is a record most appellate specialists who do nothing else for a living never approach, and Motley compiled it while also trying cases in the trial courts of the Deep South, where the danger was not losing a motion but the drive back to the hotel.