Prof. Tamar Meshel examines mobile-based ride-sharing and food-delivery companies

Assistant Professor Tamar Meshel, an authority in international and domestic arbitration at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, has published research on recent cases involving mobile-based ride-sharing and food-delivery companies.

Her essay, “Mobile-Based Transportation Employment Disputes: Corporate Chutzpa and the Potential Resurrection of Class Arbitration,” was published in the University of Chicago Law Review Online in June.

Examining a recent decision by a U.S. federal court, which held DoorDash to its contractual obligation to arbitrate the claims of over 5,000 individual drivers, Meshel questions the view that arbitration favours companies’ interests at the expense of employees. In the context of ride-sharing and food-delivery companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash, she argues that class arbitration can be an appealing option for both companies and drivers.

In April, Meshel published her article, entitled “Heller v. Uber Technologies Inc.: Can Hard Cases Make Good Law?” in the Advocates’ Quarterly on a case that was before the Supreme Court of Canada at the time of publication. She asserted that the fundamental principles of international commercial arbitration, and specifically the principle of “commerciality,” offer the best way forward in the context of the Heller v. Uber Technologies Inc. case.

At the end of June, the SCC issued a decision on this case. Meshel’s latest article on the judgment, which analyzes it from an international commercial arbitration perspective, is forthcoming in Arbitration International.

In it, she argues that the judgment should not disturb the enforcement of routine international commercial arbitration agreements in Canada, but the judgment may have implications for arbitration agreements contained in international standard form contracts that might give rise to employment disputes, such as those in the gig economy.

Meshel also has forthcoming work on mobile-based ride-sharing companies in the Virginia Law & Business Review, which addresses the controversial question of whether drivers of such companies should be considered “transportation workers” who are engaged in “interstate commerce” within the meaning of the American Federal Arbitration Act.