Cite as: 538 U. S. 401 (2003)
Opinion of the Court
in a manner that casts their enforceability into doubt, take upon ourselves the authority to decide the antecedent question of how the ambiguity is to be resolved.2 515 U. S., at 541. In short, since we do not know how the arbitrator will construe the remedial limitations, the questions whether they render the parties' agreements unenforceable and whether it is for courts or arbitrators to decide enforceability in the first instance are unusually abstract. As in Vimar, the proper course is to compel arbitration. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Justice Thomas took no part in the consideration or decision of this case.
2 If the contractual ambiguity could itself be characterized as raising a "gateway" question of arbitrability, then it would be appropriate for a court to answer it in the first instance. But we noted just this Term that "the phrase 'question of arbitrability' has a . . . limited scope." Howsam v. Dean Witter Reynolds, Inc., 537 U. S. 79, 83 (2002). Indeed, we have "found the phrase [question of arbitrability] applicable in the kind of narrow circumstance where contracting parties would likely have expected a court to have decided the gateway matter, where they are not likely to have thought that they had agreed that an arbitrator would do so, and, consequently, where reference of the gateway dispute to the court avoids the risk of forcing parties to arbitrate a matter that they may well not have agreed to arbitrate." Id., at 83-84. Given our presumption in favor of arbitration, Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital v. Mercury Constr. Corp., 460 U. S. 1, 24-25 (1983), we think the preliminary question whether the remedial limitations at issue here prohibit an award of RICO treble damages is not a question of arbitrability.
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