Cotter v. Eastern Conference of Teamsters Retirement Plan

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• stating that a court, not an arbitrator must decide “the threshold issue of the existence of an agreement to arbitrate”
• noting that where there is a 22 delegation provision, issues relating to whether a contract is voidable, such as infancy of 1 a party, are decided by an arbitrator
• determining that Prima Paint was limited to challenges seeking to avoid or rescind a contract, not to challenges going to the very existence of a contract that a party claims never to have agreed to
• noting that the defendant’s 11 “burden is substantial and the Court must give the party denying the existence of an agreement 12 the benefit of all reasonable doubts and inferences that may arise” (cleaned up)
• explaining that the ques- tion of “whether the signatory had authority to bind the plaintiffs to the agreement” must be decided by a district court because it “go[es] to the very existence of a contract that a party claims never to have agreed to”
• agreeing with the Third Circuit that there if is a doubt as to whether an agreement to arbitrate exists, the matter “should be submitted to a jury”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).