Showing it will soldier on without Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court granted cert, vacated, and remanded an arbitration decision from West Virginia yesterday. Because this is the exact same treatment the Court gave a case from Hawaii’s highest court in January (and the same treatment I predicted, ahem), it suggests SCOTUS is trying to go on with business as usual.
So, what was the West Virginia case? It is the Schumacher Homes case I wrote about last July, in which that state’s highest court refused to enforce the parties’ delegation clause, even after acknowledging the rule in Rent-A-Center, because it found the word “arbitrability” was ambiguous.
This GVR (grant, vacate, and remand) falls in line with other recent arbitration summary reversals from SCOTUS. Prof. Drahozal, in an interesting article called “Error Correction and the Supreme Court’s Arbitration Docket,” helps put it in context (Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2014).
