Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 275

529US1

Unit: $U37

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CORTEZ BYRD CHIPS, INC. v. BILL HARBERT
CONSTR. CO.
Opinion of the Court

more pronounced due to the courts’ general inhospitality to
forum selection clauses, see The Bremen v. Zapata Off-Shore
Co., 407 U. S. 1, 9–10 (1972). Hence, even if an arbitration
agreement expressly permitted action to be brought in the
district in which arbitration had been conducted, the agree-
ment would probably prove to be vain. The enactment of
the special venue provisions in the FAA thus had an obvi-
ously liberalizing effect, undiminished by any suggestion,
textual or otherwise, that Congress meant simultaneously to
foreclose a suit where the defendant resided. Such a conse-
quence would have been as inexplicable in 1925 as it would
be passing strange 75 years later. The most convenient
forum for a defendant is normally the forum of residence,
and it would take a very powerful reason ever to suggest
that Congress would have meant to eliminate that venue for
postarbitration disputes.

The virtue of the liberalizing nonrestrictive view of the
provisions for venue in the district of arbitration is conﬁrmed
by another obviously liberalizing venue provision of the Act,
which in § 9 authorizes a binding agreement selecting a
forum for conﬁrming an arbitration award. Since any forum
selection agreement must coexist with §§ 10 and 11, one
needs to ask how they would work together if §§ 10 and 11
meant that an order vacating or modifying an arbitration
award could be obtained only in the district where the award
was made. The consequence would be that a proceeding to
conﬁrm the award begun in a forum previously selected by
agreement of the parties (but outside the district of the arbi-
tration) would need to be held in abeyance if the responding
party objected. The objecting party would then have to re-
turn to the district of the arbitration to begin a separate

as restrictive views of personal jurisdiction meant that it was often difﬁ-
cult to sue a defendant outside the district of his residence. Cf. Interna-
tional Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U. S. 310, 316 (1945) (requiring that a
defendant have minimum contacts with a forum to be subject to its
judgment).