While the oral argument before the United States Supreme Court in Sutter today was ostensibly about whether to affirm an arbitrator’s decision that the parties’ contract authorized class arbitration, the decision really turns on how the Court will review all arbitration decisions.  (Transcript here.)  Multiple Justices expressed an unwillingness to create a special standard for reviewing arbitrator decisions involving class arbitration.  (Info on the underlying case here.)

Appellant’s counsel tried valiantly to express some standard of review that fit within the Court’s past jurisprudence, but also allowed for vacatur of this particular result.  In response to questions like “how wrong does an arbitrator’s decision have to be to become an issue of law?” (from Justice Sotomayor), counsel advocated that Stolt-Nielsen and Concepcion established a “presumption” that there is no consent to class arbitration without a “very clear statement of a meeting of the parties’ minds.”  However, Justice Kagan quickly noted that the Court had never suggested such a presumption in either of those cases.  Appellant’s counsel later advocated for a slightly different formulation: a reviewing court may vacate the arbitrator’s decision to allow class  arbitration if the contractual language “leaves no room for a conclusion that the parties agreed to” arbitrate on a classwide basis.  Justice Kennedy, who often casts a deciding vote in close cases,  expressed skepticism about whether the Court’s repeated and highly deferential standard of review for decisions by arbitrators allowed any kind of inquiry into the merits of the arbitrator’s contractual analysis.

Respondent’s counsel, of course, emphasized the very limited grounds for vacating an arbitration award.  He noted that Appellant argues the arbitrator “exceeded his power,” but because Appellant consented to giving the arbitrator authority to determine whether the arbitration could proceed as a class, the only way the arbitrator could have exceeded his power was by basing his award on something other than an interpretation of the contract.  This led to a series of amusing hypotheticals in which Justice Breyer asked Respondent’s counsel to assume that an arbitrator made her decision based on consulting a “magic 8-ball” (Justice Scalia pretended not to know the reference) and then asked whether that would constitute “manifest disregard” of the law or otherwise serve as grounds for vacating the award.  Justice Breyer’s questions hint that the Court may give “manifest disregard of the law” new life as a separate basis for vacating arbitration awards, and that the Court is looking for a backstop beyond just the four bases in the FAA for parties to rely on if arbitrators get the law or facts really, really wrong.

Curiously, from a Court that has vigorously enforced arbitration agreements for all types of cases, the Justices appeared skeptical of arbitrators’ capability to handle class actions, and questioned whether arbitrators were wrongly incentivized.  Justices asked how the arbitrator was compensated in this case, whether he was experienced, how many class actions were handled in arbitration (neither side could answer, since that information is not public), and whether an arbitrator would be incentivized by his own fees to create a class action after seeing a case like Sutter drag on for eleven years.  To that, Respondent’s counsel gave a good soundbite: “if we trust arbitrators to handle such important issues as civil rights issues and other very important matters [], we have to expect that they will follow the precepts of this Court and the FAA as to what constitutes grounds for class arbitration.”