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''Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital v. Mercury Construction Corp.'' (), commonly cited as ''Moses Cone'' or ''Cone Hospital'', is a United States Supreme Court decision concerning civil procedure, specifically the abstention doctrine, as it applies to enforcing an arbitration clause in a diversity case. By a 6–3 margin, the justices resolved a complicated construction dispute by ruling that a North Carolina hospital had to arbitrate a claim against the Alabama-based company it had hired to build a new wing, even though it meant that it could not consolidate it with ongoing litigation it had brought in state court against the contractor and architect. Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority that a district court's stay of the contractor's petition to compel arbitration was an "abuse of discretion". It had not properly applied the Court's prior ruling in ''Colorado River Water Conservation District v. United States''. Since the net effect of the stay was to force the contractor to litigate in state court, Mercury's appeal to the Fourth Circuit was proper, and the appeals court properly reversed the stay. Since the contract was covered by the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), the hospital had no way to avoid arbitration, which the contractor could not be assured of getting under existing state law. William Rehnquist's dissent, joined by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Sandra Day O'Connor, accused the majority of misreading the case in order to get the contractor into arbitration. He argued that another case, ''Will v. Calvert Fire Insurance Co.'', permitted the district court's action, which in any case was routine docket management practiced by many district judges. While arbitration was not the main issue in the case, it had a profound effect on future cases concerning the FAA. Two of Brennan's passing ''dicta'', that the FAA applied to actions in state court and that it enacted a national policy in favor of arbitration, became the central holdings of ''Southland Corp. v. Keating'' the following year, a case from which O'Connor and Rehnquist dissented. Those holdings have been challenged, even by some other justices, as fundamentally at odds with the language and legislative history of the FAA, even as the Court has continued to expand its scope since then. ==Source of the dispute== In 1975 Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, North Carolina, contracted with Mercury to build a new wing. The contract, drafted by the hospital's attorneys, vested most dispute resolution authority, relating to aesthetic matters, in the project's architect, J.N. Pease Associates of Charlotte, with the opportunity to go to arbitration if the architect did not rule on the dispute within ten days of the evidence being presented, or if they disagreed with its decision. The project was scheduled to completed by October 1977, but due to change orders and some other problems the hospital and Mercury agreed on a two-year extension, provided Mercury withhold its claim for delay and impact costs until after the work was done. By February 1979 the wing was substantially complete, except for some punch list items. In January 1980, Mercury submitted its claim for up to $2 million in additional costs to the architect. Over the next several months, Mercury and the architect went over the claim, apparently with the goal of reducing it. The hospital contended later it was unaware of these negotiations until April of that year, and that the architect exceeded its contractual powers by delaying and allowing the claims to be presented after completion. By the time it was aware, the claim had been reduced to $600,000–1.2 million. When it was presented with the claim, the hospital asked for time to have its own expert review it. Mercury, the hospital and the architect met in August in Birmingham, Alabama. Mercury offered the hospital access to its files. The hospital asked that the copies be mailed to its expert, who was unable to attend the meeting due to a scheduling conflict. The parties agreed to meet again in October. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital v. Mercury Construction Corp.」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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