It should probably be bigger news: A participant in arbitration proceedings got them stopped after arguing that the process available was inherently racially biased. That’s important enough. That the party behind the motion was Jay-Z just makes it more mystifying that not everyone has heard about this case. But I guess not everyone harbors a deep concern about diversity in the judiciary, the encroachment of arbitration, and the happenings of the Commercial Division of the New York Supreme Court.
Jay-Z agreed to arbitration concerning a brand-related conflict with Iconix. But when it came time to propose four potential arbitrators from the American Arbitration Association’s list, he encountered a problem. As Jay-Z’s filing would put it, he was “confronted with a stark reality: he could not identify a single African American arbitrator on the ‘large and complex cases’ roster.”
Just three of the AAA’s 200 members are African American. One has a conflict and isn’t available to handle this case. The legal argument was slightly more complicated, but what it boiled down to—and what persuaded Justice Saliann Scarpulla to delay proceedings—was that there’s no way he or any other African Americans could be assured a fair panel because of unconscious bias, among other differentiators.
It’s an important decision in light of the country’s oppressively white-and-getting-whiter federal judiciary. Take a criminal trial, even a jury trial, in which the jury rather than the judge is responsible for conviction. Judges make anywhere between dozens and thousands of decisions in the court of cases of this nature that can be, and are, infected by racial bias.