Another Unanimous SCOTUS Decision on Arbitration

Okay, this one’s not very interesting, but can’t stop, won’t stop giving updates on SCOTUS arbitration decisions.

The issue in Smith v. Spizzirri was whether a court can dismiss a case instead of staying it, pending arbitration.  The matter is one of pure textualism.  The statute says that the court “shall on application of one of the parties stay the trial of the action until [the] arbitration” has concluded.

When we need someone to write a purely textualist opinion, we turn to .  . . Justice Sotomayor. It took her all of six pages to hold that, no, a court cannot dismiss a proceeding when the statute says to stay it. I’m sure that one of the Court’s more rigorous textualists could have reached the same conclusion in twenty pages, replete with citations from historical dictionaries, corpus linguistics analysis, and perhaps (because we are fancy now), some references to generative AI.

There was actually a circuit split on whether courts could dismiss actions when all claims are subject to arbitration rather than stay the proceedings.  So the Court was engaged in some routine but necessary housekeeping.

Thanks to Will Baude and Dan Epps‘ excellent Divided Argument podcast for pointing out two things that make this straightforward case more interesting.  First, the Ninth Circuit opinion challenged in the case featured a two-Judge concurrence.  By my sophisticated math, two judges are a majority of a Circuit-Court panel, but this case nicely illustrates why there might be a concurring opinion by a majority of an appeals court panel, while it would be odd to find a majority opinion labeled a “concurrence” if it came from SCOTUS.  The three judges on the Ninth Circuit panel were all agreed that Ninth Circuit precedent allowed for dismissals.  Two of the judges, disturbed by the practice in disharmony with the statutory text, noted the circuit split and asked SCOTUS to step in.

The second point raised in this week’s Divided Argument episode is why federal courts would do one thing when the statute commands them to do something else. Will Baude suggests that courts might do so in an attempt to improve their statistics on docket clearing.  If they stay a case, it remains on the ledger until the matter is resolved. Stayed arbitrations can make it look like courts are way behind in addressing pending matters. 

I don’t know enough to judge the motivation, and it would be really interested to know more. I can imagine judges (or the clerk’s office) either worrying about the apparent backlog of unresolved matters or taking pride in their efficiency in resolving cases.  I can also imagine judges wanting to point to a backlog of cases in order to argue for more resources or the creation of new positions for federal district judges.  Divided Argument put out a call for learned commentary, so we’ll see if they follow up.