The Trilogy and Its Offspring Revisited: It's a Contract, Stupid

My purpose here is to present a relatively simple analytical framework for describing the role of the courts in enforcing arbitration provisions in collective agreements. It is not a framework articulated in the Court's opinions, but one which underlies, perhaps subconsciously, the results. It emphasizes the contract roots of arbitration, not in Willistonian terms of worshipping the written word, but more in Corbin's way of looking to the implicit understanding of the parties and their purposes.