In case number 17-1272, Henry Schein v. Archer and White Sales, Inc., Justice Kavanaugh has the opinion of the court. This is a case about arbitration. In 1925, Congress passed and President Coolidge signed the Federal Arbitration Act. Under the act, arbitration is a matter of contract, and courts must enforce arbitration contracts according to their term. Applying the Act, we have held that parties may agree to have an arbitrator decide not only the merits of a particular dispute, but also gateway questions of arbitrability, such as whether the party's agreement covers a particular controversy.
Even when the party's contract delegates the threshold arbitrability question to an arbitrator, the Fifth Circuit... in this case and some other courts of appeals have determined that the court, rather than an arbitrator, should decide the threshold arbitrability question if, under the contract, the argument for arbitration is wholly groundless. Those courts have reasoned that the wholly groundless exception enables courts to block frivolous attempts to transfer disputes from the court system to arbitration.
The question here is whether the wholly groundless exception is consistent with the text of the act and with our precedent. We conclude that it is not. We must interpret the act as written, and the act in turn requires that we interpret the contract as written.
When the party's contract delegates the arbitrability question to an arbitrator, a court may not override the contract. possesses no power to decide the arbitrability issue. That conclusion follows not only from the text of the Act but also from precedent. We have held that a court may not rule on the potential merits of the underlying claim that is assigned by contract to an arbitrator even if the claim appears to the court to be frivolous. That principle applies with equal force to the threshold issue of arbitrability.
Just as a court may not decide a merits question that the parties have delegated to an arbitrator, a court may not decide an arbitrability question that the parties have delegated to an arbitrator. In an attempt to overcome the statutory text in this court's cases, the party opposing arbitration here, a business known as Archer & White, advances several arguments. In cases like this, as Archer & White sees it, the arbitrator will inevitably conclude that the dispute is not subject to arbitration and then send the case back to the district court.
So why waste the time and money? The short answer is that the act contains no wholly groundless exception and we may not engraft our own exceptions onto the statutory text. In addition, contrary to Archer and White's claim, it is doubtful that the wholly groundless exception would save time and money systemically. even if it might do so in some individual cases. Archer and White assumes that it is easy to tell when an argument for arbitration of a particular dispute is wholly groundless.
We are dubious. The exception would inevitably spark collateral litigation over whether a seemingly unmeritorious argument for arbitration is wholly groundless as opposed to groundless. We see no reason to create such a time-consuming sideshow.
Archer and White further assumes that an arbitrator would reject arbitration in those cases where a judge would conclude that the argument for arbitration is wholly groundless. Not always. After all, an arbitrator might hold a different view of the arbitrability issue than a court does, even if the court finds the answer obvious. It is not unheard of for one fair-minded adjudicator to think a decision is obvious in one direction. but for another fair-minded adjudicator to decide the matter the other way.
In sum, we reject the wholly groundless exception. The exception confuses the question of who decides arbitrability with the separate question of who prevails on arbitrability. When the party's contract delegates the arbitrability question to an arbitrator, the courts must respect the party's decision as embodied in the contract. We express no view about whether the contract at issue in this case, in fact, delegated the arbitrability question to an arbitrator. The Court of Appeals did not decide that issue.
Under our cases, courts should not assume that the parties agreed to arbitrate arbitrability unless there is clear and unmistakable evidence that they did so. On remand, the Court of Appeals may address that issue in the first instance, as well as other arguments that Archer and White has properly preserved. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is vacated and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with our opinion. Our opinion is unanimous.