Court Opinion

ID: 9705171
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 00:58:42.696453+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:08.493818
License: Public Domain

BROSKY, Judge,
concurring and dissenting:
I respectfully dissent in part and concur in part for the reason that appellant’s claim should be considered waived. The judgment entered on the order of the court below should therefore be affirmed.
The problem I find with the majority opinion is best demonstrated by a comparison of two portions of that opinion. The majority first states that “whether a dispute is within the terms of an arbitration agreement is for the court to determine.” However, the opinion goes on to conclude that “[w]hether the evidence supported a finding that appellees’ trees were a crop, and therefore within the arbitration provision of the right-of-way agreement, was a decision for the arbitrators to make.”
*310If, as the majority states, the question of whether a dispute is within the scope of an arbitration agreement is only for the court to determine, I fail to see what relevance at all the arbitrators’ decision on that issue has.1 Therefore, despite the fact that the record indicates the arbitrability issue was tried to the arbitrators, I believe the lower court should have made an independent evaluation of that issue.
Although the majority states that it is “clear that the court [below] ... ‘determine^] the scope of the matters submitted to arbitration’, I do not find this to be the case. The court below had no record of the arbitration proceedings, had no opinion from the arbitrators, and took no testimony. Under such circumstances, it seems unlikely that it was able to determine the arbitrability issue. If, however, the court did indeed make such a determination, it did so in a fashion that I believe has left us unable to properly review its ruling. There is no record of the proceedings below except for the court’s “somewhat cryptic” orders and as the majority indicated we are without the benefit of an opinion from the lower court.
In the usual case, I believe such circumstances would warrant a remand for a hearing on the record to determine the arbitrability of the dispute. However, in this case, I believe appellant has waived its claim.
When appellees initially filed their amended complaint in equity, they charged appellant with “excavation of farm land, destruction of fences and crops, stampeding of cattle and spraying of ecologically harmful defoliants ... which ... caused substantial damage to ... trees, crops, and property.”
Appellant, in its answer to the complaint alleged that the “cause of action for spraying ... and for other damages” *311was barred by the provision in the right-of-way agreement providing that damages not agreed upon must be determined by arbitration and that arbitration was “the exclusive remedy available to plaintiffs for any damages” (emphasis added).
In other words, appellant, when the action was in the forum it now argues was the proper one, maintained that arbitration offered the exclusive remedy to appellees for any damages. Then, after suffering an unfavorable result in that arbitration, it returns to the court and argues that the dispute had, indeed, all along belonged in the court.
I believe appellant’s action in arguing to the court that the dispute belonged in arbitration should be considered a waiver of any future claim that the dispute was outside the scope of the arbitration agreement. To hold otherwise would simply encourage parties to follow the procedure of appellant in order to give themselves a possible second chance to litigate the merits of a dispute should they lose in the arbitration proceeding.
Thus, I would affirm the judgment of the Court below.

. I note that all of the cases cited by the majority in support of the proposition that the arbitrability of a dispute is for the court to determine involve instances in which one party has sought to enjoin the other party from proceeding to arbitration. Thus, unlike the instant case no prior determination by the arbitrators existed at the time of the appeal.