Page:Coinbase, Inc. v. Bielski.pdf/21

8 Because neither the statute nor any background law states that an interlocutory appeal over arbitrability triggers a mandatory general stay of trial court proceedings, the majority opinion resorts to spinning such a rule from a single sentence in Griggs v. Provident Consumer Discount Co., 459 U. S. 56 (1982) (per curiam). But Griggs expresses a far narrower principle, and is thus insufficient to support the majority’s mandatory-general-stay rule.

Griggs stands for a modest proposition: Two courts should avoid exercising control over the same order or judgment simultaneously. The problem Griggs identifies is the “danger a district court and a court of appeals would be simultaneously analyzing the same judgment.” Id., at 59. The cure Griggs prescribes is that “[t]he filing of a notice of appeal … divests the district court of its control over those aspects of the case involved in the appeal.” Id., at 58.

And the reason is simple. Two courts simultaneously analyzing the same judgment could step on each other’s toes. It would interfere with the appellate court’s review of an order if the district court modified that order mid-appeal. Instead, an order should be reviewed by one court at a time.

This notion of “one order, one reviewing court” is all that was at issue in Griggs. Griggs concerned a party that tried to appeal a judgment while the District Court was still considering whether to alter that same judgment. Id., at 56. The Court held that the appeal needed to wait until after the District Court’s work on that judgment was done. Id., at 60–61. This result, which followed from the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure, was necessary to “avoi[d]” the situation “in which district courts and courts of appeals would both have had the power to modify the same judgment.” Id., at 60 (emphasis added).

Properly understood and applied here, Griggs divests the district court of control over only a narrow slice of the case. The interlocutory appeal addresses an order declining to