94
Opinion of Ginsburg, J.
These decisions hold that the party resisting arbitration bears the burden of establishing the inadequacy of the arbitral forum for adjudication of claims of a particular genre. See Gilmer, 500 U. S., at 26; McMahon, 482 U. S., at 227. It does not follow like the night the day, however, that the party resisting arbitration should also bear the burden of showing that the arbitral forum would be financially inaccessible to her.
The arbitration agreement at issue is contained in a form contract drawn by a commercial party and presented to an individual consumer on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The case on which the Court dominantly relies, Gilmer, also involved a nonnegotiated arbitration clause. But the "who pays" question presented in this case did not arise in Gilmer. Under the rules that governed in Gilmer—those of the New York Stock Exchange—it was the standard practice for securities industry parties, arbitrating employment disputes, to pay all of the arbitrators' fees. See Cole v. Burns Int'l Security Servs., 105 F. 3d 1465, 1483 (CADC 1997). Regarding that practice, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently commented:
"[I]n Gilmer, the Supreme Court endorsed a system of arbitration in which employees are not required to pay for the arbitrator assigned to hear their statutory claims. There is no reason to think that the Court would have approved arbitration in the absence of this arrangement. Indeed, we are unaware of any situation in American jurisprudence in which a beneficiary of a federal statute has been required to pay for the services of the judge assigned to hear her or his case." Id., at 1484.
III
The form contract in this case provides no indication of the rules under which arbitration will proceed or the costs a
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