A Partial Final Arb Award Is Not Really Final

Maplebear v. Busick, No. A151677 (D1d2 Aug. 21, 2018)

California state courts generally only have jurisdiction to vacate or confirm arbitration awards when they are final. Under Code of Civil Procedure § 1283.4, that means the award “include[s] a determination of all the questions submitted to the arbitrators the decision of which is necessary in order to determine the controversy.” It’s basically the equivalent of the one final judgment rule for taking an appeal under § 904.1.

Plaintiff here contends that her employment agreement permits class arbitration. The arbitrator agreed, issuing a “Partial Final Award” on that issue. The ruling was limited to contract interpretation. It did not decide the merits of whether a class should or could actually be certified.

Defendant filed a petition to vacate in superior court. But the superior court “denied” it for being unripe, and thus lacking in jurisdiction under § 1283.4. The Court of Appeal here affirms. 

As a threshold matter, the Court holds that the trial court’s order was appealable. Under the California Arbitration Act, denials of motions to confirm or vacate generally aren’t appealable, because only a grant of one of those motions gives rise to an appealable final judgment. But here, the “denial” was really a dismissal. It, for all intents and purposes, fully resolved the trial court case, even if it didn’t resolve the arbitration. It was thus appealable under § 1294(b).

But the trial court was right on the merits. The arbitrator’s ruling was not a final ruling under § 1283.4. Indeed, it left unanswered almost every question raised by Plaintiff’s arbitration demand. 

Defendant suggests that Cable Connection, Inc. v. DIRECTV, 44 Cal. 4th 1334 (2008), suggests otherwise. But its argument isn’t based on the holding of Cable Connection, which was addressed to whether parties could preserve the right to judicial review of legal errors. Instead, Defendant argues that: (1) because Cable Connection’s procedural posture entailed a similar interlocutory-ish review; (2) because the court did not flag any jurisdictional defects (a concurrence pointed out only that they weren’t addressing the issue) and (3) because jurisdiction is an irreducible threshold for a court reaching the merits of a question, a fortiori, the Supreme Court must have implicit held that it had jurisdiction, otherwise it wouldn’t have reached a decision on the merits.

But that overreads the significance of Cable Connection’s silence. It is true that subject matter jurisdiction can be raised at any time, even sua sponte by an appellate court, and isn’t waivable. Nonetheless, it is well-established that an appellate opinion’s silence on a jurisdictional issue is not precedent by negative implication that jurisdiction must have existed under the facts of the prior case. See Kaiser Found. Health Plan, Inc. v. Superior Court, 13 Cal. App. 5th 1125, 1142 (2017); Lewis v. Casey, 518 U.S. 343, 352, n.2 (1996) (“we have repeatedly held that the existence of unaddressed jurisdictional defects has no precedential effect”). The law does not develop by through mistake.

Affirmed.