The D.C. Circuit issued only one opinion last week: Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen v. National Railroad Passenger Corp. In 2017, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen (“the Union”) filed a complaint in federal district court arguing that Amtrak had violated their collective bargaining agreement by refusing to say that it would use Union-represented workers in a new building. The district court sent the case to mandatory arbitration in front of the National Railroad Adjustment Board, which dismissed the claim as beyond its jurisdiction. In the Board’s view, Amtrak hadn’t yet assigned any signal-related work in the new building, so the Union was asking for an “advisory opinion” based on a “hypothetical set of facts that has yet to materialize.”

The district court vacated the Board’s award, and in an opinion by Judge Henderson, the D.C. Circuit affirmed. The court recognized that it had to uphold the award so long as the arbitrator was “even arguably construing or applying the contract and acting within the scope of his authority.” But here, the Board failed to even mention the collective bargaining agreement, much less interpret it. Instead, the Board based its decision on its supposed lack of jurisdiction—a rationale that also missed the mark. Under federal law, the Board has jurisdiction over “disputes … growing out of the interpretation or application of agreements concerning rates of pay, rules, or working conditions.” Thus, the Board had jurisdiction over the parties’ dispute about the proper interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement, even if Amtrak hadn’t put its interpretation into practice yet. The court therefore ordered that the case return to the Board for further proceedings.