Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties

**Opinion:** https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-83\_3e04.pdf ## Case background Between 2017 and 2020, petitioner Adrian Jules worked at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles, California. When the hotel ended his employment in March 2020, Jules sued in Federal District Court in New York, alleging that respondents had unlawfully discriminated against him in violation of federal and state law. Citing an arbitration agreement Jules had signed before beginning work at the hotel, respondents moved to stay the federal proceedings pending arbitration under § 3 of the Federal Arbitration Act. The District Court held that the agreement covered Jules’s claims and stayed the case. Jules then commenced arbitration. The arbitrator issued a final award ruling against him on all claims and awarding respondents roughly $34,500 in sanctions. Back before the same District Court that had stayed the case, respondents moved to confirm the award under § 9 while Jules cross-moved to vacate it under § 10. Relying on Badgerow v. Walters, Jules argued that the court lacked jurisdiction because the § 9 and § 10 motions neither presented a federal question nor satisfied the requirements for diversity jurisdiction. The District Court disagreed and confirmed the award, and the Second Circuit affirmed, distinguishing Badgerow as a freestanding action and holding that a court with the power to stay an action under § 3 has the further power to confirm any ensuing award. The Fourth Circuit had held otherwise, and this Court granted certiorari to resolve the split. ## Questions Presented (1) Whether a federal court that initially exercises jurisdiction and stays a case pending arbitration maintains jurisdiction over a post-arbitration Section 9 or 10 application where jurisdiction would otherwise be lacking. ## Holding A federal court that has previously stayed claims in a pending action under § 3 of the Federal Arbitration Act has jurisdiction to confirm or vacate a resulting arbitral award on those claims as prescribed in § 9 and § 10 of the Act. Unlike the freestanding applications in Vaden v. Discover Bank and Badgerow v. Walters, assessing jurisdiction here requires no “looking through” to a controversy outside the court: the District Court had original jurisdiction over Jules’s federal claims under 28 U. S. C. § 1331, nothing in the Federal Arbitration Act stripped that jurisdiction while the parties arbitrated, and jurisdiction to decide a case includes jurisdiction to decide a motion within it. The Act’s structure confirms the result: § 3 requires a stay rather than dismissal precisely so a court can superintend the arbitration through confirmation or vacatur. Nothing in the Act precludes the normal operation of federal jurisdiction over live claims still pending before a federal court. Affirmed. ## The Court Justice Sotomayor delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court. ## What this episode contains This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in *Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties*, written by Justice Sotomayor. **AI disclosure:** The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Sotomayor. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.