With its last opinion of 2015, the Justices added DIRECTV v. Imburgia to the ever-growing line of decisions reversing state court refusals to enforce arbitration agreements. The particular topic here is classwide arbitration. Three years ago, after California courts refused to enforce provisions in arbitration agreements that barred class arbitration (on the ground that the provisions were unconscionable), a closely divided court in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion disagreed, holding that the Federal Arbitration Agreement preempted the California doctrine invalidating those waivers.

For several years before the Court’s decision in Concepcion, the California courts were invalidating waivers of classwide arbitration as unconscionable. During that time, DIRECTV included a clause in its agreement indicating that the entire arbitration clause should be invalidated if the waiver was “unenforceable” under the “law of your state.” It should have surprised nobody when the California courts concluded that, because those waivers remain unenforceable under California law (albeit preempted California law), they should toss the entire arbitration agreement. Nor should it surprise anybody that the Supreme Court decided to review and reverse that decision.

Justice Stephen Breyer mused at argument that, despite his dissent from Concepcion, this case seemed to follow so closely upon it that a contrary ruling amounted to little more than evasion of the earlier case. Presumably that line of thinking is what motivated Chief Justice John Roberts to assign the opinion to Justice Breyer, and it certainly pervades the opinion’s analysis. Indeed, the discussion starts with a paean to the importance of lower courts following the Supreme Court’s opinions (even those “from which four Justices dissented”), closing with a quotation of the Supremacy Clause.

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