Kagan, J., dissenting
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 17–988
LAMPS PLUS, INC., ET AL., PETITIONERS v. FRANK VARELA
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
[April 24, 2019]
Justice Kagan, with whom Justice Ginsburg and Justice Breyer join, and with whom Justice Sotomayor joins as to Part II, dissenting.
The Federal Arbitration Act (FAA or Act) requires courts to enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms. See ante, at 6. But the Act does not federalize basic contract law. Under the FAA, state law governs the interpretation of arbitration agreements, so long as that law treats other types of contracts in the same way. See DIRECTV, Inc. v. Imburgia, 577 U. S. ___, ___ (2015) (slip op., at 6). That well-established principle ought to resolve this case against Lamps Plus’s request for individual arbitration. In my view, the arbitration agreement Lamps Plus wrote is best understood to authorize arbitration on a classwide basis. But even if the Court is right to view the agreement as ambiguous, a plain-vanilla rule of contract interpretation, applied in California as in every other State, requires reading it against the drafter—and so likewise permits a class proceeding here. See Sandquist v. Lebo Auto., Inc., 1 Cal. 5th 233, 247, 376 P. 3d 506, 514 (2016). The majority can reach the opposite conclusion only by insisting that the FAA trumps that neutral state rule whenever its application would result in class arbitration. That holding has no basis in the Act—or in any of our decisions relating to it (including the heavily relied-on
