Opinion ID: 201945
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Undue Means

Text: 18 National Casualty also argues that the arbitration panel's decision should be vacated as the product of undue means. Section 10(a)(1) permits vacatur [w]here the award was procured by corruption, fraud, or undue means. 9 U.S.C. § 10(a)(1). While this circuit has never confronted a claim for vacatur for undue means, our sister circuits sensibly read the clause in a way that bars National Casualty's claim. The phrase undue means in the statute follows the terms corruption and fraud. It is a familiar principle of statutory construction that a word should be known by the company it keeps. See Jarecki v. G.D. Searle & Co., 367 U.S. 303, 307, 81 S.Ct. 1579, 6 L.Ed.2d 859 (1961). The best reading of the term undue means under the maxim noscitur a sociis is that it describes underhanded or conniving ways of procuring an award that are similar to corruption or fraud, but do not precisely constitute either. See Paine-Webber Group, Inc. v. Zinsmeyer Trusts P'ship, 187 F.3d 988, 991 (8th Cir.1999) (The term `undue means' must be read in conjunction with the words `fraud' and `corruption' that precede it in the statute.); Am. Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO v. U.S. Postal Serv., 52 F.3d 359, 362 (D.C.Cir.1995) (undue means refers to conduct equivalent in gravity to corruption or fraud, such as a physical threat to an arbitrator). 19 Nothing appellant has argued suggests that First State acted in a manner amounting to the kind of intentional malfeasance that justifies vacatur under the statute. Here, one party was offered a choice between producing documents or having to contend with an inference about their content. This, as we have just discussed, was a choice that was within the arbitrator's power to offer. To hold that the arbitrator may offer choice A or choice B to a party, but that the party's selection of choice B would invalidate the arbitrator's award, would defy common sense, and we will not do it. We therefore affirm the district court's holding that First State did not procure the arbitrator's award by undue means.