{"id":5725,"date":"2025-05-09T22:42:54","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T22:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/live-nation-wants-supreme-court-to-reverse-ruling-on-ticket-agreements\/"},"modified":"2025-05-09T22:42:54","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T22:42:54","slug":"live-nation-wants-supreme-court-to-reverse-ruling-on-ticket-agreements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/live-nation-wants-supreme-court-to-reverse-ruling-on-ticket-agreements\/","title":{"rendered":"Live Nation Wants Supreme Court to Reverse Ruling On Ticket Agreements"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tL<\/span>ive Nation is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling last year that said the concert giant couldn\u2019t enforce \u201copaque and unfair\u201d arbitration agreements against ticketbuyers, warning the justices that the scathing ruling \u201ccreates massive uncertainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe decision, issued in October by a lower court, said the contracts Live Nation had forced concertgoers to sign \u2013 requiring them to resolve disputes via private arbitration \u2014 were \u201cso dense, convoluted and internally contradictory\u201d that they were \u201cborderline unintelligible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a petition to the Supreme Court this week, Live Nation says that the decision must be reversed, warning it would have \u201cfar-reaching consequences\u201d for how arbitration works and could potentially cause massive headaches for companies that have long relied on such agreements.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf allowed to stand, the decision below will enable mass arbitration plaintiffs to continue their abusive strategy of racking up procedural costs to the point of forcing the defendant to capitulate to a settlement, rather than proving their allegations,\u201d Live Nation\u2019s lawyers write. \u201cThese highly disruptive consequences reinforce the need for review.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe appeal to the Supreme Court comes in a class-action lawsuit accusing Live Nation of violating federal antitrust laws by monopolizing the market for concert tickets and engaging in \u201cpredatory\u201d behavior. Filed in 2022 on behalf of \u201chundreds of thousands if not millions\u201d of ticket buyers, the case claims Live Nation and Ticketmaster abused their dominance to charge \u201cextraordinarily high\u201d prices to consumers.<\/p>\n

\n\tFaced with those allegations, Live Nation argued that fans had waived their right to sue in court when they bought their tickets because they had signed arbitration agreements \u2014 a common requirement when purchasing tickets and other services from many companies.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn rejecting that argument in October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Live Nation\u2019s agreements were \u201cunconscionable and unenforceable\u201d since they would make it \u201cimpossible\u201d for fans to fairly pursue claims against the company.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cForced to accept terms that can be changed without notice, a plaintiff then must arbitrate under \u2026 opaque and unfair rules,\u201d the appeals court wrote at the time. \u201cThe rules and the terms are so overly harsh or one-sided as to unequivocally represent a systematic effort to impose arbitration as an inferior forum.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ruling described Live Nation\u2019s agreements in scathing terms, calling them \u201cso dense, convoluted and internally contradictory to be borderline unintelligible\u201d and \u201cpoorly drafted and riddled with typos.\u201d The terms were so confusing, the court said, that Live Nation\u2019s own attorneys had \u201cstruggled to explain the rules\u201d during a court hearing.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe criticism centered on Live Nation\u2019s decision to alter its terms of use to require fans to submit to \u201cnovel and unusual\u201d procedures for \u201cmass arbitration.\u201d That new process, offered by an upstart arbitration firm called New Era ADR, was aimed at handling many cases at once rather than individually, which Live Nation believed was necessitated by aggressive tactics from lawyers representing huge numbers of concertgoers.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in rejecting that new process, the Ninth Circuit said Live Nation was essentially trying to have its cake and eat it too: \u201cDefendants sought to gain in arbitration some of the advantages of class-wide litigation while suffering few of its disadvantages.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn this week\u2019s petition to the Supreme Court, it was Live Nation\u2019s turn to level criticism \u2013 calling the Ninth Circuit\u2019s ruling a \u201cdeeply flawed decision\u201d that exemplified the kind of \u201cjudicial hostility\u201d to private arbitration that\u2019s prohibited under federal law.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Ninth Circuit\u2019s decision below flouts [federal arbitration law], defies this court\u2019s precedents, and threatens to block sensible measures for addressing the new phenomenon of mass arbitration filings,\u201d the company\u2019s lawyers write.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe plaintiffs in the case will file a response in the weeks ahead, and the justices will decide whether to take the case at some point in the next few months. Reps for both sides did not immediately return requests for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Live Nation is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling last year that said the concert giant couldn\u2019t enforce \u201copaque and unfair\u201d arbitration agreements against ticketbuyers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[718,143,344,1206,5871,686,533,1453],"class_list":["post-5725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-agreements","tag-court","tag-live","tag-nation","tag-reverse","tag-ruling","tag-supreme","tag-ticket"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}