Jackson, J., dissenting
and throw up some objection—to venue, jurisdiction, or a dispositive element of the merits—to trigger a mandatory stay. For plaintiffs, then, every preliminary-injunction motion becomes a trap: Even if the motion is granted, the defendant can take that opportunity to stop the trial court proceedings in their tracks.
Facing these destabilizing consequences, the majority stops short of following its own reasoning to that ominous conclusion. Today’s holding reaches only arbitration appeals under §16(a). Ante, at 1, 7. And it might well be that the concerns motivating today’s mandatory-general-stay rule do not extend beyond arbitration. So the majority will not commit, for example, to concluding that appeals over non-arbitration forum-selection clauses warrant the same mandatory stay. Ante, at 9.
I agree with that hesitation—even one step further down this path is much too far. The mandatory-general-stay rule that the Court manufactures is unmoored from Congress’s commands and this Court’s precedent. And the windfall that the Court gives to defendants seeking arbitration, preferencing their interests over all others, is entirely unwarranted. The Court now mandates that result no matter how unjust that outcome is, according to traditional equitable standards, in a given case. This endeavor is unfounded, unwise, and—most fundamentally—not our role.
