Applied Underwriters Captive Risk Assurance Company, Inc. v. Citizens of Humanity, LLC, et al.

“Congress adopted the [Federal] Arbitration Act in 1925” because “courts were unduly hostile to arbitration.” Epic Sys. Corp. v. Lewis, 138 S. Ct. 1612, 1621 (2018). Over 75 years later, “judicial antagonism toward arbitration” continues to “manifest[ ] itself in a great variety of devices and formulas.” Id. at 1623 (internal quotation marks omitted). In Mastrobuono v. Shearson Lehman Hutton, Inc., 514 U.S. 52 (1995), to prevent choice-of-law clauses from transforming into an anti-arbitration “device,” the Court held that, where a contract contains both a general choice-of-law clause and an arbitration provision, the choice-of-law clause “encompass[es] substantive principles that [the chosen state’s] courts would apply, but not . . . special rules limiting the authority of arbitrators.” Id. at 64. And in Rent-A-Center, West, Inc. v. Jackson, 561 U.S. 63 (2010), to avoid judicial hostility toward the delegation of questions of arbitrability to arbitrators, the Court held that the FAA requires a litigant to mount a challenge that is “specific to [an arbitration agreement’s] delegation provision” in order to avoid the enforcement of that provision. Id. at 74. The Court below contravened both of these mandates. The questions presented are: 1. Whether a general choice-of-law clause in a contract that contains an arbitration agreement should be read, consistent with the Federal Arbitration Act and this Court’s decisions, to import state substantive law without importing state rules impairing