The Rams Football Company, LLC, et al. v. St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority, et al.

The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) is designed to ensure that arbitration agreements are enforced according to their terms and placed on equal footing with other contracts. This Court has stated that courts should apply ordinary state-law contract principles to determine whether an arbitration agreement exists, and should enforce provisions that authorize arbitrators to decide questions of arbitrability—e.g., whether an arbitration agreement covers a dispute—when the parties’ intent to arbitrate arbitrability is “clear and unmistakable.” In this case, the parties expressly incorporated into their arbitration agreement the rules of the American Arbitration Association existing at the time any dispute may arise. At the time of the dispute at issue here, those rules expressly assigned arbitrability questions to the arbitrator. Although a federal court held in the context of this very agreement that such an incorporation clearly and unmistakably evinces the parties’ intent to arbitrate arbitrability under state contract law, the Missouri appellate court below held that the same agreement does not satisfy this Court’s “clear and unmistakable” test. That decision not only defies the FAA and this Court’s precedent; it entrenches a lower-court split regarding the import of the “clear and unmistakable” test and evinces the very hostility to arbitration that the FAA was enacted to counteract. The question presented is: Whether the Federal Arbitration Act permits a court to refuse to enforce the terms of an arbitration agreement assigning questions of arbitrability to the