Opinion ID: 612587
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Necessarily Decided

Text: The necessarily decided prong of the collateral estoppel test ensures that the prior court actually ruled on the issue at hand. The issue must have been squarely addressed, or directly decided, in the former suit before it can be held as conclusive for subsequent litigation. Tootle v. Player, 225 Ga. 431, 169 S.E.2d 340, 341 (1969) (quoting Brown v. Brown, 212 Ga. 202, 91 S.E.2d 495, 497 (1956)). [I]t is of the essence of estoppel by judgment that it is certain that the precise fact was determined by the former judgment. De Sollar v. Hanscome, 158 U.S. 216, 221, 15 S.Ct. 816, 39 L.Ed. 956 (1895). The essential role of this necessarily decided requirement is that it prevents judgments that rest on ambiguous grounds from having issue preclusive effect. Thus, where two or more possible grounds would theoretically support a judgment, and both were actually litigated, and the court does not clearly state on which ground its judgment rests, the judgment cannot have issue preclusive effect as to either issue, for neither is definitively the ground of the judgment. See Restatement of Judgments § 27, cmt. i (If a judgment of a court of first instance is based on determinations of two issues, either of which standing independently would be sufficient to support the result, the judgment is not conclusive with respect to either issue standing alone.); see also Callaway v. Irvin, 123 Ga. 344, 51 S.E. 477, 480 (1905) (Thus, where several defenses are pleaded, and the judgment does not show upon which issue the decision was rendered, there is no estoppel.). [29] By contrast, an issue is necessarily decided when the prior court in fact resolved it. Lindsey v. State, 282 Ga. 447, 651 S.E.2d 66, 71 (2007) (quotation omitted). This case easily satisfies the necessarily decided prong. The state court's order was unambiguous, and addressed only one issue: whether Strong's state-court claims were subject to binding arbitration. It squarely resolved this issue against the Cash America defendants. This is not a case in which a court issued an ambiguous dismissal order without stating its grounds or reasoning. Only one issue was before the court, and only one issue was decided. While the state court did not decide the issue of whether the arbitration agreement would have been enforceable in the counterfactual world in which the defendants did not commit discovery abuses, that issue did not need to be decided, because it was irrelevant. The defendants did commit discovery abuses. Thus, the only issue to be decided was whether the agreement was enforceable in spite of the discovery abuses. This issue the court explicitly and necessarily decided.