138
Souter, J., dissenting
exemptions: for "contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce." Like those other courts, this Court sees the sequence as an occasion to apply the interpretive maxim of ejusdem generis, that is, when specific terms are followed by a general one, the latter is meant to cover only examples of the same sort as the preceding specifics. Here, the same sort is thought to be contracts of transportation workers, or employees of transporters, the very carriers of commerce. And that, of course, excludes respondent Adams from benefit of the exemption, for he is employed by a retail seller.
Like many interpretive canons, however, ejusdem generis is a fallback, and if there are good reasons not to apply it, it is put aside. E. g., Norfolk & Western R. Co. v. Train Dispatchers, 499 U. S. 117, 129 (1991).2 There are good reasons here. As Adams argued, it is imputing something very odd to the working of the congressional brain to say that Congress took care to bar application of the Act to the class of employment contracts it most obviously had authority to legislate about in 1925, contracts of workers employed by carriers and handlers of commerce, while covering only employees "engaged" in less obvious ways, over whose coverage litigation might be anticipated with uncertain results. It would seem to have made more sense either to cover all coverable employment contracts or to exclude them all. In fact, exclusion might well have been in order based on concern that arbitration could prove expensive or unfavorable to em-2 What is more, the Court has repeatedly explained that the canon is triggered only by uncertain statutory text, e. g., Garcia v. United States, 469 U. S. 70, 74-75 (1984); Gooch v. United States, 297 U. S. 124, 128 (1936), and that it can be overcome by, inter alia, contrary legislative history, e. g., Watt v. Western Nuclear, Inc., 462 U. S. 36, 44, n. 5 (1983). The Court today turns this practice upside down, using ejusdem generis to establish that the text is so clear that legislative history is irrelevant. Ante, at 119.
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