Are Our Veterans Being Cheated?

In order to partially repay veterans who have sacrificied years of their lives to defend our country, the government created the Service-members Civil Relief Act, or S.C.R.A, in order to protect veterans from repossession or foreclosure without a court order (New York Times). However, the brutal truth is that this law may have been infringed upon more than 15,000 times in 2012 alone. This means that in a single year thousands of war veterans returned home from duty to find that they had not just lost their innonence, and maybe one or more of their limbs, but also their cars or homes. 

As explained by The New York Times, this injustice occurs because of a law policy known as arbitration, a system "where the courtroom rules of evidence do not apply". Though, supposedly, abitration is "more efficient and less expensive than court", the reality is that the law tactic is a way around the United States' typical justice system (i.e. no judge or jury is involved) and, because of simple economics, arbitrators (the stand-in judges) are more likely to side with large companies than individual. Also, many use arbitration reluctantly because of the high costs of court. Even though regular civilians can be legally subjected to it, veterans are protected from arbitration and the legal disadvantages that come with it by the laws of the S.C.R.A. (New York Times). 

A former Air Force attorney, Colonel John S. Odom, was quoted in the NYT article, saying "mandatory arbitration threatens to take these laws [of the S.C.R.A.] and basically tear them up". The phrase "tear them up" suggests that the military doesn't just feel that arbitration avoids or circumvents their laws but actual insults or dishonors veterans returning home. And I agree with that viewpoint. Thousands of U.S. veterans come home from wars abroad every year, many of them carrying a host of new life challenges, including P.T.S.D., physical injuries, and financial struggles. Any company, such as Nissan which was exemplified in the article, that uses arbitration as a means to strip service members of their legal rights is certainly dishonoring them.