Opinion ID: 67517
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: McDermott and Nutmeg.

Text: The McDermott court then considered and rejected an analogy to Nutmeg  a case not involving the Convention  in which a similar contractual provision was deemed to waive removal. The Nutmeg contract had only a single forum selection clause reading: [W]e, at your request agree to submit to the jurisdiction of any Court of Competent jurisdiction within the United States and will comply with all requirements necessary to give such Court jurisdiction and all matters arising hereunder shall be determined in accordance with the law and practice of such court. Nutmeg, 931 F.2d at 14. That language, of course, also resembles the second of the three New Orleans bases for waiver of removal, but it is neither explicit nor express. The McDermott court  if it had adopted the rule that the Underwriters urge  could easily have distinguished Nutmeg just by pointing this out and explaining that although an implied waiver was adequate in Nutmeg, it could never be enough in the context of the Convention. Instead, the court demonstrated that although the Nutmeg contract was unambiguous, the McDermott contract was not. The McDermott court, 944 F.2d at 1207, pointed out that the Nutmeg decision resulted partly from the rule that contracts are to be construed against the drafter and that that rule was inapplicable to the McDermott contract. [8] The McDermott court also observed that the Nutmeg contract had only a single relevant venue provision instead of two potentially conflicting ones. Id. McDermott suggested only one way in which the Convention affected waiver of removal rights: The Convention applies to arbitration agreements and arbitration awards involving United States citizens and at least one foreign citizen. That was the case in McDermott. [9] In McDermott, though  as explained above  the presence of international defendants made the personal jurisdiction explanation more plausible. Id. at 1205-06 & n. 10. In Nutmeg, all the parties were domestic, and it therefore seemed less likely to the McDermott court that the parties would have specifically waived objections to personal jurisdiction. See id. at 1207. Thus the applicability of the Convention gave the McDermott court another reason to find ambiguity. [10] Though the McDermott court distinguished Nutmeg in many ways, it never said that the Convention affected the waiver standard. [11] Having shown that neither the contractual language itself nor an analogy to interpretations of similar language in other cases compelled a conclusion that removal rights had been waived, the McDermott court concluded that the parties had executed an ambiguous contract and disavowed any expressed intent regarding wavier of Convention removal rights, meaning that no waiver existed. Id. at 1209. If the McDermott contract had been unambiguous, or if the parties to it had somehow expressed intent to waive removal rights, the court presumably would have found a waiver despite the Convention's applicability and the lack of magic words.