Arbitration Denied in Credit Card Case After Contract Ruled Void

A federal district court properly ruled that it, not an arbitrator, should hear a dispute between a high-interest credit card lender and two of its customers, a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

“The change-in-terms clause here is so one-sided as to deprive the purported contract of any meaningful idea of reciprocity that a contractual bargain is meant to embody,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said for the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Johnson and Crider filed their suits in state court alleging that Continental Finance Co. LLC and Continental Purchasing LLC violated Maryland’s law against charging customers ...