Marquez v. Screen Actors, 525 U.S. 33, 15 (1998)

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Cite as: 525 U. S. 33 (1998)

Opinion of the Court

that the union had no other purpose but to mislead. Both claims are unpersuasive. To understand why her first claim is unconvincing, it is again helpful to recall the nature of the claim being asserted here. Petitioner's argument is not that SAG chose to use this language in the collective bargaining agreement after determining that the use of this language in the contract would deceive a large number of workers. Her argument is more ambitious. According to petitioner, even if the union always informs workers of their rights and even if it enforces the union security clause in conformity with federal law, it is bad faith for a union to use the statutory language in the collective bargaining agreement because such use can only mislead employees. Petitioner's argument fails because it is so broad. It is difficult to conclude that a union acts in bad faith by notifying workers of their rights through more effective means of communication and by using a term of art to describe those rights in a contract workers are unlikely to read. Under these circumstances, there is no intent to mislead, so the first part of petitioner's "bad faith" argument fails.

The second part of petitioner's bad faith argument—that there was no other reason for the union's choice of the statutory language—also fails. The statutory language, which we have said incorporates all of the refinements associated with the language, is a shorthand description of workers' legal rights. A union might choose to use this shorthand precisely because it incorporates all of the refinements. Petitioner argues that this reason for failing to explain all of the intricate rights and duties associated with a legal term of art is bad faith. The logic of petitioner's argument has no stopping point; it would require unions (and all other contract drafters) to spell out all the intricacies of every term used in a contract. Contracts would become massive and unwieldy treatises, yet there would be no discernible benefit from the increased mass. Because there is no stopping point to the logic of petitioner's argument, we find it unper-

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