Over a decade ago, Professor Samuel Estreicher laid plain the terms of the policy debate over arbitration of employment disputes. Invoking the provocative and memorable phrase “Saturns for Rickshaws,” Estreicher argued that the debate ultimately turned on one's view about the social goals of civil dispute resolution. Prohibiting arbitration clauses in employment disputes might guarantee a “Cadillac” system for the select few who had claims that could attract competent plaintiff's attorneys and plausible damages claims that a jury might buy. Yet for the rest (indeed the majority), civil litigation promised a “rickshaw” system – at best, little or no relief generally because their claims did not have the sticker value to attract competent counsel and, instead, languish on the dockets of understaffed and sometimes incompetent administrative agencies. By contrast, arbitration offered the prospect of “Saturns for all” – making those with “Cadillac” cases slightly worse off but those with “Rickshaw” cases comparatively better off.

While Saturns have disappeared from the new automobile market, Estreicher's metaphor retains its essential relevance to the study of arbitration. Though developed in the context of employment arbitration, it helps to frame the debate over consumer arbitration. One positive question is whether, in the consumer context, arbitration entails the same tradeoff – making a subset of consumers worse off even while making the majority of consumers better off. A related, normative question is whether that particular distribution of benefits is more socially desirable than the distribution of benefits offered by the civil litigation system.

Opinions differ sharply over the answers. To some, arbitration can help solve problems of access to justice by reducing aggregate process costs and expediting the delivery of relief to consumers with meritorious claims.