SCOTUS’S Most Recent FAA Section 1 Transportation Worker Exemption Case: Introduction
May was a big month for arbitration in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court decided the two Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) cases on its 2025 Term docket, one on subject matter jurisdiction, the other on the scope of the FAA Section 1 transportation workers exemption.
On May 14, 2026, the Court decided Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties, No. 25-83, slip op. (U.S. May 14, 2026). Jules held that “a federal court with pre-existing jurisdiction over claims that it stayed pending arbitration under §3 can adjudicate a §9 or §10 motion even if that motion does not present, on its face, an independent basis for federal jurisdiction.” Jules, slip op. at 7. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the Court’s well-reasoned, 9-0 opinion in Jules. Professor Angela Downes, Professor Richard D. Faulkner, and the author discussed the then-pending Jules case in a March 27, 2026 YouTube video hosted by the International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (“CPR”)’s Russ Bleemer and entitled Hot Topics: The Supreme Court’s March on Arbitration. The Arbitration Law Forum will be reporting more about Jules in the not-too-distant future.
But the focus of this post is the second of the two arbitration-law cases decided in May of this 2025 Term, Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock, No. 24-935, 608 U.S. ___, slip op. (May 28, 2026), which concerned the scope of the FAA Section 1 transportation workers’ exemption. In Brock the Court unanimously held that a worker who transports goods only within one State may still belong to a class of workers “engaged in . . . interstate commerce” if the transportation work they perform intrastate is part of the route the goods travel interstate. Brock, slip op. at 3. If so, then that worker’s arbitration agreement may under FAA Section 1 be exempt from FAA enforcement. Id.; 9 U.S.C. § 1.
Simple, right? Perhaps, but it underscores an important doctrinal point. Section 1 does not inquire whether a transportation worker actually crosses a state line. It does not ask whether the worker personally crosses a state line. And it does not ask whether the worker physically touched, loaded, unloaded, or otherwise interacted with a vehicle that crossed a state line. As interpreted by Brock, what Section 1 asks—though not in these precise words—is whether whether the transportation worker plays a “direct, active, and necessary” role in the interstate movement of goods, irrespective of where in the goods’ path of travel the worker played that role. Slip op. at 8. As Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch—who authored the opinion for a unanimous Court— aptly explained, applicability of the FAA does not turn on “a game of tag with vehicles” that cross state lines. Slip op. at 3. Continue Reading »
