Uber v. Heller: When Arbitration Becomes a Wall Instead of a Door

There is a point where the formality of a contract begins to lose its connection to fairness. That point became impossible to ignore in Uber Technologies Inc. v. Heller, a case that asked whether justice can still be called justice when the price of entry is out of reach.

David Heller was a food delivery driver in Toronto using Uber’s platform. To take the job, he had to accept Uber’s standard agreement. Hidden in that document was an arbitration clause that required all disputes to be resolved in Amsterdam, under the International Chamber of Commerce Rules. It also required a filing fee of around $14,500, just to get started, far more than what Heller earned in a year.

There was no mention of these costs in the contract. No warning. No alternative. Just a clause buried in fine print, setting terms that very few workers could ever afford to meet. Heller brought a claim under employment law in Ontario. Uber tried to stop the lawsuit, saying the agreement required the case to go to arbitration. But the Supreme Court of Canada saw things differently.

The Court did not stop at the surface. It looked at what the clause really meant in practice. It found that there was a serious imbalance of power. Heller had no bargaining ability, no legal advice, no access to the resources needed to pursue arbitration abroad. The clause was technically valid, but it operated as a barrier. It did not open a path to resolution. It closed one off.

The justices called the clause unconscionable. That term carries real weight. It means the contract was shaped under conditions so one-sided that the weaker party had no realistic chance of walking away or understanding the terms they accepted. This was not a disagreement about fine legal points. It was about access. A dispute process that cannot be reached by one of the parties is not a fair one, no matter how polished it looks on paper.

Beyond unconscionability, some justices framed the issue as one of public policy. They warned that allowing companies to create contracts that block legal remedies entirely would undermine the legal system itself. Arbitration, they noted, is not just a private choice. It still depends on being a real, functioning process, something that both sides can actually use.

What this decision recognizes is that arbitration clauses do not exist in a vacuum. Their effect depends on the world they are dropped into. If a clause creates a process that a worker cannot realistically access, then that process is no process at all.

The broader meaning of Uber v. Heller lies in how it re-centers fairness. It moves the conversation away from whether the words were clearly written, and toward whether they were fairly applied. That change matters. It pushes courts to ask not only what a clause says, but what it does. If it shuts the door to justice while pretending to open one, then courts may have a duty to step in.

As more digital platforms and global companies lean on standard form agreements, this kind of scrutiny will only grow more important. The case reminds us that contracts are not just about words. They are about the power to act on those words. And when that power is absent, fairness cannot be assumed.