Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela, 587 U.S. ___ (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the use of class arbitration proceedings.

[8] In 2016 Frank Varela, a Lamps Plus Inc. employee, filed a class action lawsuit against the company after a data breach exposed sensitive tax information of approximately 1,300 employees, including Mr. Varela’s, and led to the filing of a fraudulent federal income tax return on his behalf.

[10] Although Plaintiff tried to distinguish its case from Stolt-Nielsen, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that like silence, ambiguity could not support the use of class arbitration procedures.

[12] This reasoning highlighted the Court’s commitment to the policy favoring enforcement of arbitration agreements, codified in the FAA, in spite of the fact that as Justice Kagan argued in dissent, contra proferentem is a neutral state contract interpretation rule[13] which is not displaced by the FAA.

Justice Ginsburg’s dissent emphasized what she viewed as the oppressive nature of arbitration clauses that denied employees and consumers the ability to band together.

[17] The decision in Lamps Plus is the court’s latest iteration on restricting the availability of class arbitration procedures.