Court Opinion

ID: 9443740
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:29:25.130485+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:35.371040
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
As Judge Frank’s opinion shows, there seems to be no exact precedent for a decision here; we have been cited to none and have discovered none. The closest author*371ity is our own statement in Son Shipping Co. v. De Fosse & Tanghe, 2 Cir., 199 F.2d 687, 689: “We are aware that the time within which arbitration may be demanded may be of great importance to the parties who have by contract agreed to have their differences so determined, especially to a shipowner. But unless they see fit to condition their agreement by an express time limitation, a demand within a reasonable time, as here, is not barred.” (Italics supplied.) In addition, the New York courts have several times asserted that the enforceability of an arbitration clause presupposes “the existence of a valid and enforceable contract at the time the remedy is sought.” In re Kramer & Uchitelle, 288 N.Y. 467, 471, 43 N.E.2d 493, 495, 141 A.L.R. 1497; Raphael v. Silberberg, 274 App.Div. 625, 86 N.Y.S.2d 421; and see 9 U.S.C. § 3, also N.Y.C.P.A. § 1450, allowing a stay for reference to arbitration only “providing the applicant for the stay is not in default in proceeding with such arbitration.”
The lack of precedent leaves the issue fairly debatable. 1 must confess that Judge Frank’s opinion, arguing persuasively that laches cannot be ignored, leads me to a different conclusion, to wit, that demand for arbitration is here unreasonably delayed. For a delay of over nine years where the fair analogy of the limitation statute — so usual a general yardstick of laches — is only six, surely shows laches. This would seem to be so whatever artificial rules of burden of proof or presumption are resorted to; but the result must follow on applying the very rule set forth in Judge Frank’s opinion. Since the limitation period starting from the time of plaintiff’s alleged original breach had long since elapsed when defendant demanded arbitration, the burden was on the defendant “to aver and prove circumstances making it inequitable to apply laches to his case.” In placing that burden on plaintiff here, the opinion presumably views the statutory period as running from the time of plaintiff’s refusal to arbitrate. But to determine the timeliness of a demand for arbitration we must necessarily take the period from the breach to the demand for arbitration; to start the statute running anew by plaintiff’s refusal to arbitrate thereafter is surely to make of limitation a “topsy-turvy land” such as was charted by Judge Frank in his notable dissent in Dincher v. Marlin Firearms Co., 2 Cir., 198 F.2d 821, 823. Therefore, though not with complete certainty, I vote to reverse, a result possibly desirable in the long run as not pressing the useful and desirable device of arbitration to unreasonable and unexpected extremes.