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Page Number: 6.0

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HENRY SCHEIN, INC. v. ARCHER & WHITE SALES, INC. 

Opinion of the Court 

House,  Inc.,  866  F. 3d  1257  (CA11  2017);  Douglas,  757 
F. 3d, at 464 (Dennis, J., dissenting). 

II 
In 1925, Congress passed and President Coolidge signed
the  Federal  Arbitration  Act.  As  relevant  here,  the  Act 
provides: 

“A  written  provision  in  . . .  a  contract  evidencing  a 
transaction  involving  commerce  to  settle  by  arbitra-
tion  a  controversy  thereafter  arising  out  of  such  con-
tract  . . .  shall  be  valid,  irrevocable,  and  enforceable, 
save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for 
the revocation of any contract.”  9 U. S. C. §2. 

Under  the  Act,  arbitration  is  a  matter  of  contract,  and 
courts  must  enforce  arbitration  contracts  according  to 
their terms.  Rent-A-Center, 561 U. S., at 67.  Applying the 
Act, we have held that parties may agree to have an arbi-
trator  decide  not  only  the  merits  of  a  particular  dispute 
but  also  “ ‘gateway’  questions  of  ‘arbitrability,’  such  as
whether  the  parties  have  agreed  to  arbitrate  or  whether 
their  agreement  covers  a  particular  controversy.”    Id.,  at 
68–69; see also First Options, 514 U. S., at 943.  We have 
explained that an “agreement to arbitrate a gateway issue 
is  simply  an  additional,  antecedent  agreement  the  party
seeking  arbitration  asks  the  federal  court  to  enforce,  and
the  FAA  operates  on  this  additional  arbitration  agree- 
ment just as it does on any other.”  Rent-A-Center, 561 U. S., 
at 70. 

Even when the parties’ contract delegates the threshold
arbitrability  question  to  an  arbitrator,  the  Fifth  Circuit 
and  some  other  Courts  of  Appeals  have  determined  that 
the  court  rather  than  an  arbitrator  should  decide  the 
threshold arbitrability question if, under the contract, the
argument  for  arbitration  is  wholly  groundless.    Those 
courts  have  reasoned  that  the  “wholly  groundless”  excep-