§ 25-2602.01.Validity of arbitration agreement.

Section 25-2602.01 is the foundation the rest of the act stands on: it decides which arbitration agreements a Nebraska court will enforce. A written agreement to arbitrate a controversy that already exists is valid, enforceable, and irrevocable, subject only to the same grounds — fraud, duress, unconscionability, and the like — that would let a court set aside any other contract. A clause in a written contract that commits future disputes to arbitration gets the same treatment, with one added condition: the party must have entered the arbitration provision voluntarily and willingly. The act reaches employer-employee arbitration agreements as well, and where the parties’ contract addresses a point the act also covers, the contract controls — except on two subjects the act refuses to let parties contract around.

Those two protected subjects are workers’ compensation claims, which the act’s validity rules never reach, and a list of claim types where a future-disputes arbitration clause specifically does not apply: personal injury claims based in tort, claims under the Nebraska Fair Employment Practice Act, agreements between parties covered by the Motor Vehicle Industry Regulation Act, and most insurance-policy agreements (reinsurance contracts between insurance companies are the exception, along with a narrow carve-back in section 44-811). A worker who signed a broad arbitration clause years before an on-the-job injury, for instance, cannot be forced into arbitration on a resulting tort claim or a workers’ compensation claim under this section.

The section closes by resolving conflicts with other Nebraska statutes that also touch arbitration. Where the Uniform Arbitration Act would otherwise clash with the Uniform Act on Interstate Arbitration and Compromise of Death Taxes, or with a handful of named sections dealing with things like construction contracts and real estate transactions, those other statutes control instead.