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Souter, J., dissenting
contracts that had not been targeted with special legislation. Congress did not need to worry especially about the FAA's effect on legislation that did not exist and was not contemplated. As to workers uncovered by any specific legislation, Congress could write on a clean slate, and what it wrote was a general exclusion for employment contracts within Congress's power to regulate. The Court has understood this point before, holding that the existence of a special reason for emphasizing specific examples of a statutory class can negate any inference that an otherwise unqualified general phrase was meant to apply only to matters ejusdem generis.4 On the Court's own reading of the history, then, the explanation for the catchall is not ejusdem generis; instead, the explanation for the specifics is ex abundanti cautela, abundance of caution, see Fort Stewart Schools v. FLRA, 495 U. S. 641, 646 (1990).
Nothing stands in the way of construing the coverage and exclusion clauses together, consistently and coherently. I respectfully dissent.
4 In Watt v. Western Nuclear, Inc., supra, at 44, n. 5, the Court concluded that the ejusdem generis canon did not apply to the words "coal and other minerals" where "[t]here were special reasons for expressly addressing coal that negate any inference that the phrase 'and other minerals' was meant to reserve only substances ejusdem generis," namely that Congress wanted "to make clear that coal was reserved even though existing law treated it differently from other minerals."
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