The Supreme Court Does Not Decide Whether The Ninth Circuit's Decision Was Correct, Only Whether The Decision Was For The Court To Make.
The parties "had executed two contracts: the User Agreement, which sent disputes about arbitrability to arbitration, and the Official Rules, which appeared to send disputes to California courts." Coinbase, Inc. v. Suski, No. 22-3 (S. Ct. 5/23/24). The Official Rules governed a sweepstakes to enter for a chance to win Dogecoin, and in fact, respondents had entered the sweepstakes. The Ninth Circuit held that the Official Rules, which sent disputes to California courts, superseded the User Agreement which would have delegated arbitration and arbitrability matters to an arbitrator. The United States Supreme Court affirmed.
However, the Supreme Court ruling is narrow. It does not decide whether the Ninth Circuit was correct. Rather, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson explains, "We granted certiorari to answer the question of who—a judge or an arbitrator—should decide whether a subsequent contract supersedes an earlier arbitration agreement that contains a delegation clause." All the Supreme Court decides is that in a case where there are multiple agreements that conflict over whether the dispute is to be arbitrated, a court decides which agreement prevails.
Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred with the understanding that the Court was not deciding whether the Ninth Circuit was applying contract principles correctly.
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