Badgerow v. Walters (20-1143)

argument 20-1143

Badgerow v. Walters

Supreme Court of the United States 51 min 5 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 6 days ago official recording ↗

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What is the central question the Court is addressing in Badgerow v. Walters?

John G. Roberts 0:00

We'll hear argument next in case twenty eleven forty three, Badgerow versus

Unknown 0:06

Walters. Mr. Geyser. Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court. The question presented is whether Vaden's look-through approach applies to applications to enforce or vacate an arbitration award under Sections 9 and 10 of the Federal Arbitration Act. The answer is controlled by the FA's plain text and the competing statutory arguments are not close. The look through approach is no ordinary jurisdictional doctrine. It is an express textual departure. from the well-pleaded complaint rule. This textual exception is found solely in Section 4. It applies exclusively to petitions under that single section. Congress did not repeat this unique language anywhere else in the Act. In fact, there is not a single textual hint in any other section that a look through analysis is allowed or appropriate.

Unknown 0:54

Yet according to respondents, the look through approach somehow applies to every section of the FAA, instead of the single section where it actually appears. Respondence theory fails on every conceivable level. For over a century now, the well pleaded complaint rule has governed the exercise of jurisdiction in federal courts. That's the rule that applies unless Congress says otherwise. And Congress said otherwise in Section four alone. Congress did not isolate the look through clause in Section four because it wanted it applied in other sections where it was excluded. Nor did Congress endorse respondents' notion of an upside down default rule, where courts ignored the face of the well pleaded filing and instead looked to a non existent phantom pleading that never appears in any court.

Unknown 1:41

Respondence theory would require overturning bedrock jurisdictional doctrine and abandoning this court's fidelity to the statutory text. There is simply no basis for saying the look through approach applies in sections nine and ten without judicially rewriting the statute or rendering section four's express look through clause wholly superfluous. I welcome the court's questions.

Clarence Thomas 2:06

Uh counsel, we have said or suggested from time to time that the FAA doesn't provide uh federal question jurisdiction. So how do you square that with the notion that section four, section eight provides such jurisdiction?

Unknown 2:24

Well I I think the best reading of this court's cases is it was referring generally to the idea that when uh an action arises under federal law, then it the federal law itself provides jurisdiction. The court wasn't parsing the individual sections of the act and saying whether there's a specific independent grant of jurisdiction. But ultimately I don't think it matters because there are only two ways to read Section 4. We read Section 4 as providing jurisdiction. Jurisdiction, but the alternative is to read Section 4 as providing an instruction to courts on how to exercise jurisdiction under sections like 1331 and 1332. And that instruction says you can look through to the underlying dispute. Now that's the departure from the well-pleaded complaint rule that traditionally governs every other filing in the Act.

Unknown 3:10

And that exception, that express instruction to depart from that traditional rule is found Only in Section four. So even if jurisdiction is ultimately deemed to vest under thirteen thirty one, per section four's instruction, which is basically what this court said in Vaden, you come out to the same uh it comes out to the same outcome. Uh whether you adopt that approach, you say section four itself is an independent grant of jurisdiction.

Clarence Thomas 3:33

Well, isn't that an odd statute that you just have one provision in a long statute that uh a grants jurisdiction in sort of a uh a roundabout way.

Unknown 3:46

Well, I uh I think that the the Federal Arbitration Act is deemed slightly anomalous, but I think what's absolutely clear from the FAA is that the only basis for departing from the well-pled complaint rule is in fact in Section 4. If Congress wanted that rule to apply to every section of the Act, it could have put it in a freestanding provision that applied globally, just like it did with Section 6 and saying that applications or petitions on the Act are treated as motions, or as it did in the International.