Source: https://blog.cpradr.org/tag/gorsuch/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 04:58:39+00:00

Document:
U.S. Circuit Court cases referencing mediation aren’t unusual. Since most cases settle before they get to a courthouse, and long before they reach the appellate levels, the intervention of a third-party neutral is commonplace part of the recounting of the case histories that ultimately appear before appeals courts.
But it’s comparatively rare for a U.S. Circuit Court to write and rule on mediation mechanics.
Last night’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Tenth U.S. Circuit Court Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, of Denver, has written about the mechanics and effects of mediation in his decade on the bench at the circuit’s home in Denver.
In Hand v. Walnut Valley Sailing Club, Case No. 11-3228 (10th Cir. April 4, 2012)(available at http://bit.ly/2jVWsO7), a unanimous Tenth Circuit panel strongly backed mediation confidentiality in an order and judgment written by Gorsuch—a rare pronouncement on mediation and how it works by a federal circuit court.
For fans of mediation, it’s an instructive and fun read for its support of the ADR process, even though the appeals court’s support of a district court dismissal because a litigant abused mediation confidentiality rules was focused on a pleading technicality.
In the unanimous, three-judge panel order, Gorsuch details a move by the plaintiff, a member of the defendant sailing club, to tell “at least” 44 club members and others why a mediation of the plaintiff’s suit against the club failed.
The email sent by the plaintiff “disparage[ed] the club’s positions and relat[ed] all the details of the mediation, including what the mediator said and the amount of the club’s settlement offer,” the order states.
The plaintiff, according to the Gorsuch judgment, had complained to Kansas’s governor “that a storage shed owned by [the] sailing club didn’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.” The club revoked the plaintiff’s membership, and the plaintiff filed suit.
That was the sole issue, Gorsuch wrote, that the appeals panel saw as “worthy of mention,” noting that without the briefing, the issue couldn’t be considered.
Gorsuch also had to address the effect of a mediation settlement agreement in A.F. v. Espanola Public Schools, No. 14-2139 (Sept. 15, 2015)(available at http://bit.ly/2ki2QAa).
The case was mediated as per the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and settled. But the IDEA’s procedures contemplate moves for further relief under other statutes, but only after the act’s procedures have been exhausted.
Both parties took advantage of the mediation step in the act, according to the 2-1 Gorsuch opinion. The case settled.
Then, the plaintiff filed suit on behalf of her daughter under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and 42 U.S.C. § 1983, making the same allegations in federal court that she had made in her original administrative complaint, and which were successfully resolved in mediation.
The Gorsuch opinion affirmed a district court decision that said the plaintiff hadn’t exhausted her remedies under the IDEA scheme for the second suit.
The plaintiff claimed that because she had mediated her claim under the IDEA procedure scheme, the procedures’ application to her new claim had been exhausted, or were inapplicable.
Gorsuch’s opinion didn’t take issue with the mediation results itself, and even agreed that the plaintiff’s court case could proceed under the other statutes, so long as it followed the IDEA procedures required for the other laws.
But the opinion said that the IDEA procedure enabling the subsequent suit also required exhaustion of the claims, under the statute’s plain terms. The mediation wasn’t enough. For those claims using the statute to launch the plaintiff’s subsequent lawsuit, the opinion said, more is required for exhaustion of the IDEA resolution procedures than the mediation for the first IDEA claim.
A dissent stated that a more reasonable interpretation of the IDEA is that a mediated resolution constitutes exhaustion for the pursuit of other permitted claims.
A review of the arbitration opinions involving Tenth U.S. Circuit Court Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, who last night was nominated to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy, doesn’t provide a definitive indication on how his arbitration votes might fall if the U.S. Senate approves of his nomination.
The 49-year-old Gorsuch, who has been on the Tenth Circuit bench since President George W. Bush nominated him and he was confirmed by the Senate in 2006, has participated in appellate panels that have backed awards, compelled arbitration and reversed a failure to compel arbitration.
But the narrow scope of arbitration cases in which the circuit judge has participated, and the issues on which the cases were decided, don’t show a pronounced tilt toward business or consumers.
In his most arbitration-centric decision, Gorsuch’s preferred path is adherence to contract law principles, combined with a customary view of the Federal Arbitration Act among federal judges.
There is little in the 38 arbitration opinions that the Tenth Circuit website produces in a search of Gorsuch’s work—mostly incidental mentions–that rises to the level of significance of the preemption of state law and class waiver issues that have steadily appeared at the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent history.
But if confirmed quickly, Gorsuch could find himself participating in the decisions on three cases taken by the Court on Jan. 13 that will be argued together this term, and will settle whether employees can be required as a condition of employment to arbitrate their workplace disputes individually, while waiving their rights to a class process.
The long-simmering group of cases is a clash between the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Arbitration Act, and an extension to the employment arena of the leading class waiver/mandatory arbitration case in consumer contracts, AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011), which Gorsuch was quoting directly in the passage above.
Arbitration watchers who want to try to handicap the Court’s path likely will need to become acquainted with Gorsuch’s by now well-publicized animosity toward the so-called Chevron Doctrine, in which the U.S. Supreme Court has backed deference to administrative agency determinations. See Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council, 467 U.S. 837 (1984)(available at http://bit.ly/1EirXXt).
In an immigration law decision last year, Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, No. 14-9585 (Aug. 23, 2016)(available at http://bit.ly/2kPDvh5), Gorsuch blasted Chevron in a concurrence, writing that its deference to the executive branch agencies in derogation of legislative power runs counter to the Constitution’s separation of powers checks-and-balance system.
The issue could control the arbitration outcome in the three employment arbitration cases at the Court, which currently are being briefed and not yet scheduled for oral argument. They emanate from a January 2012 opinion by the National Labor Relations Board.
In one of the three cases, the Board itself is a party, appealing a Fifth Circuit decision which overturned its earlier administrative decision. See NLRB v. Murphy Oil USA Inc., No. No. 16-307 (U.S. Supreme Court case page is available here: http://bit.ly/2kOPxal. Scotusblog’s page including briefs and a link to the Fifth Circuit opinion is available here: http://bit.ly/2kPvTyi).
If the Chevron Doctrine doesn’t figure in a Gorsuch view of the current arbitration cases, the NLRB’s moves to preserve class actions by forbidding mandatory arbitration may be another hot button for the former U.S. Supreme Court clerk.
Gorsuch has problems with class actions in securities cases. When he was in private practice, he wrote that “economic incentives unique to securities litigation encourage class action lawyers to bring meritless claims and prompt corporate defendants to pay dearly to settle such claims.” Neil M. Gorsuch and Paul B. Matey, “Settlements in Securities Fraud Class Actions: Improving Investor Protection,” Critical Legal Issues–Working Paper Series No. 128 (Washington Legal Foundation April 2005)(available at http://bit.ly/2kTBDCZ).
Despite involvement as a panel member in cases producing about a dozen opinions or orders, the Howard case discussed above is one of only three arbitration writings exclusively by Gorsuch in his decade-long tenure on the court. One of the three is a dissent.
The Tenth Circuit website revealed Gorsuch’s opinions, and orders with judgments, but didn’t produce unpublished opinions in which Gorsuch may have participated.
In Howard, Gorsuch wrote that the customarily swift determination by a lower court of whether the parties in the suit agreed to arbitration didn’t take place—fast or slow.
The case is a war over a contract, and whether and when it took effect. Gorsuch explained that it was unclear from the record whether an oral contract for the propane tank and initial delivery was followed by a written contract for future deliveries containing the arbitration clause—and restricting it to the subsequent deliveries.
Regardless, Gorsuch–joined by his two fellow appeals panel members–ruled that with material facts in dispute, the district court should have proceeded to a trial on whether an arbitration agreement existed, and should not have denied the request to arbitration.
Gorsuch took a broader FAA view in a dissent in a 2-1 Tenth Circuit arbitration case, Ragab v. Howard, No. 15-1444 (Nov. 21, 2016)(available at http://bit.ly/2gCL3pn). The dissent—in a case where his panel affirmed a lower court’s ruling that conflicting arbitration agreements in six contracts between two parties should not be arbitrated because there was no meeting of the minds as to conducting the arbitration—appears to be is his most demonstrative view of the FAA’s effect on state laws.
Gorsuch strongly rejects the majority’s use of a New Jersey case that struck arbitration where multiple contracts conflicted on the terms of arbitration. He notes that the New Jersey ruling had little application to Colorado laws, but also explains that it may not pass muster with the Supreme Court for its disregard of the FAA.
Gorsuch was the author of one additional unanimous panel order and judgment on the Tenth Circuit’s website that backed a lower court’s refusal to compel arbitration for a former top executive who was fired by a pharmaceutical company. Genberg v. Porter, No. 13-1140 (May 12, 2014)(available at http://bit.ly/2kpuRs7).
The bulk of Gorsuch’s arbitration work appearing on the Tenth Circuit website, at www.ca10.uscourts.gov, was as part of a panel where others wrote the opinion or order. Among the opinions, Gorsuch joined his fellow circuit judges in backing a lower court ruling that a suit by a union under the Railway Labor Act belonged in mandatory arbitration (BMWE v. BNSF Railway, No. 12-3061 (March 2, 2010)(available at http://bit.ly/2kpIwif).
An order noting that an arbitration acts as a res judicata bar against a subsequent suit related to the wrongful discharge suit by an ex-Department of Veterans Affairs employee, backing a Merits Systems Protection Board order. Johnson v. DOVA, No. 14-9619 (May 22, 2015)(available at http://bit.ly/2kOYaBK).
An order strongly backing a major defense contractor’s mandatory arbitration clause contained in its employment dispute resolution program. Pennington v. Northrop Grumman Space & Mission Systems Corp., No. 07-2250 (March 14, 2008)(available at http://bit.ly/2jTh49F).
An affirmance of a Colorado court that overturned an arbitration award against a company which claimed that an arbitration notice presented by its Chinese business partner didn’t put the company on notice of a deadline it missed to participate in the ADR process. CEEG (Shanghai) Solar Science v. Lumos, No. 15-1256 (July 19, 2016)(available at http://bit.ly/2kOUorT).
An nonprecedential order and judgment as to arbitration backing a lower court that refused to compel arbitration, noting that the defendants seeking ADR didn’t establish that an arbitration agreement existed. Bellman v. i3Carbon, No. 12-1275 (May 2, 2014)(available at http://bit.ly/2kp3FJT).
An order, also nonprecedential as to the FAA, sending a case to arbitration and entitling the party to attorneys’ fees and costs “incurred in enforcing its right to arbitrate.” The order reversed a federal district court denial of arbitration. The winning defendant in the Tenth Circuit was a builder that sold the plaintiffs two condominiums with a mediation and arbitration clause in the sales agreement. Lamkin v. Morinda Properties Weight Parc, No. 11-4022 (Sept. 19, 2011)(available at http://bit.ly/2jTdKeS).
A case affirming dismissal of an employee’s wrongful termination suit after it had been arbitrated, citing claims preclusion under the arbitration award. Lewis v. Circuit City Stores, 05-3383 (Aug. 31, 2007)(available at http://bit.ly/2keVY6J).
A decision reversing two federal district court denials of arbitration against an employer charged by workers with violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and an Oklahoma labor law, focusing on the scope of an arbitration clause, but in the remand order asking the lower court to consider whether the arbitration agreement preserves FLSA rights. Sanchez v. Nitro Lift Technologies, 12-7046 (Aug. 8, 2014)(available at http://bit.ly/2kT2Ple).
A determination that one of “two factually distinct injuries” related to a commercial contract fell under an arbitration clause, reversing in part a magistrate judge and a federal district court which had found that the case couldn’t be arbitrated. Chelsea Family Pharmacy PLLC v. Medco Health Solutions Inc., No. 08-5103 (June 2, 2009)(available at http://bit.ly/2jtiefT).

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