Supreme Court grants of leave to appeal are infrequent, but the Court’s latest wave of five new cases taken up for review includes three appeals on leave. All of those are criminal matters. The two other newly accepted cases, in which the Court granted certification, are civil appeals. Two of the matters in which leave to appeal was granted are connected. The first is State v. Molchor, which itself involves two consolidated cases. The question presented there, as phrased by the Supreme Court Clerk’s office, is “Under the Criminal Justice Reform Act, N.J.S.A. 2A:162-15 to...

MZM Construction Co., Inc. v. New Jersey Building Laborers Statewide Benefit Funds, ___ F.3d ___ (3d Cir. 2020). Decisions about arbitration just keep on coming, from both New Jersey and federal courts. This latest opinion, by Judge Restrepo, addresses what he called (quoting a law review article) “‘the queen of all threshold issues’ in arbitration law”: who decides ‘whether an agreement exists, when the putative agreement includes an arbitration provision empowering an arbitrator to decide whether an agreement exists?” Judge Restrepo rightly referred to...

Flanzman v. Jenny Craig, Inc., ___ N.J. ___ (2020). As discussed here, the Appellate Division in this employment discrimination case held that an arbitration provision that did not specify a forum or process for the arbitration did not reflect a meeting of the minds and was not enforceable. Defendant obtained Supreme Court review and that Court reversed in a unanimous opinion by Justice Patterson that applied de novo review to the legal issues involved. The Court restored the judgment of the Law Division that arbitration was required, but modified that judgment in one respect. Justice...