America has a hidden justice system. There, decisions are made in secret, and judges are often paid by the very companies they are supposed to judge. In any other system of justice, this would be called bribery. We call it forced arbitration, and whether you realize it or not, you are almost certainly bound by it.

Jeffrey Piccolo was. When he and his wife visited Walt Disney World, they needed to find restaurants that would accommodate her severe food allergies. According to the subsequent lawsuit filed by Mr. Piccolo, the couple were careful with what they ordered at an Irish pub and received repeated assurances from the waitstaff that their food would be safe. It wasn’t. Shortly after dinner, Mr. Piccolo’s wife began to struggle to breathe, then collapsed. She died at a nearby hospital.

When Mr. Piccolo sued Disney World’s parent company for negligence, the company tried to move the case from open court into the shadows of arbitration, where his complaint would be heard by a private judge, or arbitrator, paid for by Disney. Mr. Piccolo had apparently agreed to this system when he consented to the terms of service in his Disney+ account. Simply by subscribing to a streaming service, Disney — and the law — made clear, he could now be prevented from suing over the death of his wife in court.

People like Mr. Piccolo fight to avoid forced arbitration because it is so unlike a real court. In a real court, proceedings are almost always public, decisions can be appealed, and judges are paid for by taxpayers. In arbitration the proceedings are almost always secret, and the decisions are almost always final. Most important, when consumers and employees arbitrate against companies, it is the companies, rather than taxpayers, that often pay the costs, making arbitrators more inclined to rule for the party that is, in essence, their employer.

The statistics bear this out. In small claims courts, consumers win as often as 89 percent of the time. Before the two leading U.S. arbitration providers, consumers win just 21 percent and 33 percent of cases.

Arbitration is unfair. It is also everywhere, and it is only growing. Thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions, nearly 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies can — and do — use forced arbitration with consumers or workers. Just last year, 580,000 cases were filed with a single arbitration provider, more than all the civil cases in the federal court system in the last fiscal year.