Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. v. Byrd

Dean Witter Reynolds v. Byrd
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 4, 1984 Decided March 4, 1985
Full case name	Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. v. A. Lamar Byrd
Docket no.	83-1708
Citations	470 U.S. 213 (more) 105 S. Ct. 1238; 84 L. Ed. 2d 158
Case history
Prior	Denial of motion to compel arbitration affirmed, 726 F.2d 552 (9th Cir. 1984); cert. granted, 467 U.S. 1240.
Subsequent	Remanded to district court, 760 F.2d 238 (9th Cir. 1985).
Holding
Intent of Congress in passing Federal Arbitration Act was to promote and permit arbitration; therefore, district courts must grant motion to compel arbitration of eligible pendent claims even when result would be possibly inefficient maintenance of separate proceedings in different forums. Ninth Circuit reversed and remanded.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun Lewis F. Powell Jr. · William Rehnquist John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor
Case opinions
Majority	Marshall, joined by unanimous
Concurrence	White
Laws applied
Federal Arbitration Act, Securities Exchange Act of 1934

Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. v. Byrd, 470 U.S. 213 (1985), is a United States Supreme Court case concerning arbitration. It arose from an interlocutory appeal of a lower court's denial of brokerage firm Dean Witter Reynolds' motion to compel arbitration of the claims under state law made against it by an aggrieved former client. The Court held unanimously that the Federal Arbitration Act required that those claims be heard that way when the parties were contractually obligated to do so, even where parallel claims made under federal law would still be heard in federal court.

Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the court, resolving a conflict between the appellate circuits; Byron White added a concurrence in which he noted some issues with the underlying securities law that were not before the Court but, he felt, could in future cases make it harder for parties such as Byrd to claim that federal law always allowed them to litigate private actions for securities fraud. In the aftermath of the decision many district courts followed his opinion, leading to later Supreme Court rulings that greatly favored arbitration over litigation in securities disputes. It has been described as completing the federalization of American arbitration law.^[1]