It punts the statutory interpretation task to a Congressional agency

Statutes eventually endorsed arbitration and defined its relation to the courts. The Federal Arbitration Act of 1925 (FAA)27 attempted to ‘revers e centuries of judicial hostility to arbitration agreements . . . and to place them ‘upon the same footing as other contracts.’'28 The FAA applies to contracts within the federal maritime and commerce powers and makes agreements to arbitrate ‘enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or equity for the revocation of any contract.’29 The Act authorizes federal courts to compel arbitration30 and allows them to overturn awards only on very limited grounds, such as corruption of the arbitrator or the granting of an award in ‘manifest disregard of the law.’31

As arbitration became a familiar feature of commercial and labor practice, regularized by its own institutions and mores, courts were less likely to view it as unacceptable ‘rough justice.’ Recent Supreme Court *447 cases generally embrace arbitration.32 One likely explanation for this reversal is the judicial self-interest in reducing burdensome case loads. Many observers—including some federal judges—argue that the case load threatens the federal judiciary's capacity to perform essential functions.33 [FOOTNOTE 33 BEGINS] See, e.g., R. POSNER, THE FEDERAL COURTS: CRISIS AND REFORM 94-129 (1985) (reviewing the debilitating consequences of the ‘caseload explosion’ in the federal courts); Baker & McFarland, The Need for a New National Court, 100 HARV. L. REV. 1400, 1410-14 (1987) (proposing a new court to relieve the Supreme Court's work load); Ginsburg & Huber, The Intercircuit Committee, 100 HARV. L. REV. 1417, 1426-28 (1987) (arguing that elevation of the law-clarifying functions of the Office of Law Revision Counsel would render a new court unnecessary). [FOOTNOTE 33 ENDS] The search for case load solutions may skew legal doctrine,34 and one would expect the Court to err toward excessive receptivity to alternative fora so long as they do not displace the courts' most valued function of deciding major statutory and constitutional cases.

Arbitration in federal programs provides one solution by reducing judicial case loads. Of course, statutory allocation of adjudicative responsibilities to administrative agencies relieves the courts of initial responsibility for vast numbers of cases.35 Nevertheless, the courts retain a major supervisory role through routine judicial review of agency adjudications.36 Shifting from agency adjudication to arbitration reduces this portion of judicial case loads, because review of arbitration is so limited. Congress can provide courts further relief by assigning to agencies those aspects of review that are high in volume and low in importance.37 Therefore, the availability of arbitration in federal programs should appeal to a harried judiciary.