Plea bargaining in the United States
The constitutionality of plea bargaining was established by "Brady v. United States" in 1970, although the Supreme Court warned that plea incentives which were sufficiently large or coercive as to over-rule defendants' abilities to act freely, or used in a manner giving rise to a significant number of innocent people pleading guilty, might be prohibited or lead to concerns over constitutionality. "Santobello v. New York" added that when plea bargains are broken, legal remedies exist.
Southland Corp. v. Keating
Since "Southland" and subsequent decisions held that state courts have no basis other than standard defenses to contract validity for staying arbitration, the states have instead begun to regulate the arbitration process and agreement themselves, particularly through a model statute called the Revised Uniform Arbitration Act (RUAA) which has as of 2010 been adopted by 13 states and the District of Columbia, with three more states considering it. California now requires that an arbitrator disclose any potential conflicts of interest to parties prior to the arbitration, and New Mexico added to its version of the RUAA a "disabling civil dispute clause" making arbitration agreements voidable in consumer, credit, employment and tenant contracts. Some of these have been challenged in court. One case that did, "Green Tree Financial Inc. v. Bazzle", where a South Carolina court had ordered arbitration on a class basis, reached the Supreme Court but the majority did not consider the question, instead considering whether the contract permitted class arbitration to begin with (Rehnquist argued in his dissent that the FAA did indeed preempt).