Opinion ID: 2008738
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Shaky Edifice Enelow-Ettelson and the Road to Brandon.

Text: Shama contends that Judge Bowers' order referring Hercules' claims against it to arbitration is not an appealable order. Hercules counters that this court has jurisdiction of the appeal from that referral because it is an interlocutory order ... granting, continuing ... or dissolving or refusing to ... dissolve [an] injunction within the meaning of D.C.Code § 11-721(a)(2)(A) (1989). [4] By not allowing the judicial proceeding to continue, says Hercules, the court is in effect enjoining its prosecution, to Hercules' irreparable injury. In light of Brandon v. Hines, 439 A.2d 496 (D.C.1981), and of recent developments in the applicable law, particularly Gulfstream v. Mayacamas Corp., 485 U.S. 271, 108 S.Ct. 1133, 99 L.Ed.2d 296 (1988), this contention has become untenable. This court's appellate jurisdiction is purely statutory. Before 1971, with a single exception not here pertinent, we had jurisdiction of appeals only from final orders and judgments. Brandon, supra, 439 A.2d at 502. In 1971, Congress enlarged our jurisdiction to include, among other things, appeals from interlocutory orders respecting injunctions. Id.; see § 11-721(a)(2)(A). [5] Brandon is the only decision of this court which has addressed the applicability of the injunction statute to the grant or denial of a stay pending arbitration. We held in that case, however, that the Supreme Court's interpretation of the analogous federal statute [6] is persuasive authority in the construction of ours. 439 A.2d at 509. Before examining Brandon in detail, a few words about the development of the applicable federal law may be instructive. For many years, pursuant to a line of much-criticized cases which exalted form over substance to a truly extraordinary degree, the federal courts resolved problems of the kind here presented by invoking the so-called Enelow-Ettelson doctrine. [7] These cases and their progeny, see, e.g., Baltimore Contractors v. Bodinger, 348 U.S. 176, 75 S.Ct. 249, 99 L.Ed. 233 (1955), stood for the proposition that a grant or denial of a stay for the determination of an equitable defense was immediately appealable if the underlying action was at law, but not if the suit was in equity. As Judge Altimari retrospectively explained for the court in Steele v. L.F. Rothschild & Co., Inc., 864 F.2d 1, 2 (2d Cir.1988): Simply stated, the Enelow-Ettelson doctrine adopted the legal fiction that because an order from a chancellor staying an action at law traditionally took the form of an injunction, a stay based upon an equitable defense, e.g., the existence of an arbitration agreement, should be treated as an injunction, even though the chancellor is, in fact, a law judge. The Enelow-Ettelson doctrine had little relation to reality. [8] It was divorced from any rational or coherent appeals policy. Lee v. Ply Gem Industries, Inc., 193 U.S. App.D.C. 112, 115, 593 F.2d 1266, 1269 (D.C.Cir.), cert. denied, 441 U.S. 967, 99 S.Ct. 2417, 60 L.Ed.2d 1073 (1979). Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that it was universally criticized, Gulfstream, supra, 108 S.Ct. at 1142 n. 11; Feldspar Trucking Co., Inc. v. Greater Atlanta Shippers Ass'n, 849 F.2d 1389, 1391 (11th Cir.1988), [9] Enelow-Ettelson remained in effect for more than half a century after Enelow was decided. In 1980, however, the Court, determined to temper the tendency of the doctrine to undercut the policy against piecemeal appeals, held that an order was not appealable pursuant to § 1292(a)(1) unless it had both the practical effect of granting or denying an injunction and serious, perhaps irreparable consequences which could be effectively challenged only by immediate appeal. Carson v. American Brands, 450 U.S. 79, 84, 101 S.Ct. 993, 997, 67 L.Ed.2d 59 (1981). This was the state of the law when Brandon was decided. In Brandon, after an exhaustive analysis of the federal precedents, this court held, in accordance with Enelow-Ettelson, that a decision either to stay or not to stay a proceeding pending arbitration had the practical effect of granting or refusing an injunction. 439 A.2d at 506. Turning to the requirement in Carson of an injury sufficient to justify immediate appeal, the court concluded that denials  but not grants  of stays of litigation pending arbitration are appealable interlocutory orders, since only orders that frustrate (in contrast with facilitat[ing]) arbitration impose a sufficiently serious injury to justify an immediate appeal. Id. at 507.