Today the Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari in another case involving the Federal Arbitration Act.  The case, Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela, comes from the Ninth Circuit and raises a variation of the question from Sutter: how clear does an arbitration agreement need to be to show the parties authorized class arbitration?

My initial summary of the Ninth Circuit opinion is here.  It didn’t even merit an entire post of its own, but shared time with another circuit court opinion.  In my view, the issue of class arbitration has largely been hammered out.  SCOTUS ruled in Stolt-Nielsen that class arbitration is only allowed if the parties’ arbitration agreement authorizes it.  More recently, courts have generally concluded that courts, not arbitrators, should decide whether the parties’ arbitration agreement allows for class arbitration.  Finally, state law governs the question of how to interpret whether the parties’ arbitration agreement authorizes class arbitration.  Yet, now we will have a new decision on whether an interpretation of state law (interpreting ambiguity against a drafter to find class arbitration is authorized) should be preempted by the federal policy favoring arbitration (and particularly, favoring non-class arbitration).

Read original article


Tags: