880
Opinion of the Court
public policy may be trumped routinely by the expectations or clever drafting of private parties.7
Indeed, we do not take issue with the Tenth Circuit's observation that this case shares more in common with Lauro Lines than with Mitchell. It is hard to see how, for purposes of § 1291, the supposedly explicit "right not to be tried" element of the settlement agreement in this case differs from the unarguably explicit, privately negotiated "right not to be tried in any forum other than Naples, Italy," in that one. There, no less than here (if Digital reads the settlement agreement correctly), one private party secured from another a promise not to bring suit for reasons that presumably included avoiding the burden, expense, and perhaps embarrassment of a certain class of trials (all but Neapolitan ones or, here, all prompted by Desktop). Cf. Lauro Lines, supra, at 501 (asserted right was "surely as effectively vindicable" on final judgment appeal as was the right in Van Cauwenberghe).8 The losing argument in Lauro Lines should be a losing argument here.
7 This is not to say that rights originating in a private agreement may never be important enough to warrant immediate appeal. To the contrary, Congress only recently enacted a statute, 102 Stat. 4671, see 9 U. S. C. § 16 (1988 ed., Supp. IV), essentially providing for immediate appeal when a district court rejects a party's assertion that, under the Arbitration Act, a case belongs before a commercial arbitrator and not in court, a measure predicted to have a "sweeping impact," 15B C. Wright, A. Miller, & E. Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure § 3914.17, p. 11 (1992); see generally id., at 7-38. That courts must give full effect to this express congressional judgment that particular policies require that private rights be vindicable immediately, however, by no means suggests that they should now be more ready to make similar judgments for themselves. Congress has expressed no parallel sentiment, to the effect that settlement-agreement rights are, as a matter of federal policy, similarly "too important" to be denied immediate review.
8 To be fair, the Lauro Lines opinion does contain language that, taken alone, might lend succor to petitioner's claim, see 490 U. S., at 501 ("[A]n entitlement to avoid suit is different in kind from an entitlement to be sued only in a particular forum"), but the opinion is not easily read as
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