A short new opinion from the Ninth Circuit may run counter to long-standing Supreme Court precedent. In Casa Del Caffe Vergnano v. Italflavors, 2016 WL 1016779 (9th Cir. Mar. 15, 2016), the court refused to enforce an arbitration agreement in a contract that the parties admitted signing, because the parties simultaneously signed a second agreement declaring the first one a sham.
The story is that two undocumented immigrants chose to become a franchisee of an Italian corporation, Caffe Vergnano, and open an Italian-style coffee shop in San Diego. They signed two contracts on the same day: a “commercial contract,” which was a standard franchise agreement including an arbitration clause; and a “hold harmless agreement” that said the commercial contract “does not have any validity” because it was designed simply to allow the immigrants to obtain visas to work in the U.S. The hold harmless agreement stated the parties “will sign a future contract which will regulate their commercial relationship.”
However, the parties did not enter into a new contract. Instead, the franchisees opened their Italian coffee shop and it folded within eight months. The franchisees sued the franchisor for violations of California statutes and the franchisor moved to compel arbitration. The district court compelled arbitration and the Ninth Circuit reversed.
Repeating language from Granite Rock that contract formation is for courts to decide, and relying on federal common law regarding contracts, a majority of the panel concluded that the commercial contract “was a mere sham to help Hector Rabellino obtain a visa” and was therefore unenforceable. The majority reasoned that the hold harmless agreement proved that the parties did not mutually consent to be bound by the commercial contract.
This decision raises a close question between formation and validity, in my view, that the court ignores completely. On questions of a contract’s validity, the severability doctrine, clarified in Buckeye Check Cashing , dictates that a party challenging arbitrability must “challenge[] specifically the validity of the agreement to arbitrate” in order to have that challenge heard by the court. Otherwise, the validity issue will be addressed by the arbitrator. SCOTUS found it was immaterial whether the challenge made the underlying contract void or voidable. In a footnote in Buckeye Check Cashing, however, SCOTUS excluded a limited set of formation issues from the severability doctrine, suggesting those still belong in court:
The issue of the contract’s validity is different from the issue of whether any agreement between the alleged obligor and obligee was ever concluded. Our opinion today addresses only the former, and does not speak to the issue decided in the cases cited by respondents (and by the Florida Supreme Court), which hold that it is for courts to decide whether the alleged obligor ever signed the contract, Chastain v. Robinson-Humphrey Co., 957 F. 2d 851 (CA11 1992), whether the signor lacked authority to commit the alleged principal, Sandvik AB v. Advent Int’l Corp., 220 F. 3d 99 (CA3 2000); Sphere Drake Ins. Ltd. v. All American Ins. Co., 256 F. 3d 587 (CA7 2001), and whether the signor lacked the mental capacity to assent, Spahr v. Secco, 330 F. 3d 1266 (CA10 2003).
Is the franchisee’s argument that the hold harmless agreement nullified the commercial contract really closer to an argument that the franchisee lacked mental capacity, and therefore belonged in court? Or is it closer to an argument that the commercial contract was fraudulently induced? In my view, that is a close call, but fraudulent inducement seems the better fit, meaning this decision belonged to the arbitrator. The line between formation and validity is not clearly drawn in FAA jurisprudence, and this decision blurs it further.