When it comes to interpreting California statutes, the State’s Supreme Court can be more supreme than the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s today’s Ninth Circuit holding in Johnson v. Lowe’s Home Centers.

The two high courts had a rock-paper-scissors competition over California’s Private Attorneys General Act and arbitration. The federal high court is normally the rock to state courts’ scissors, as it was in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana (2022) 596 U.S. 639. There it disapproved the California Supreme Court’s decision in Iskanian v. CLS Transportation Los Angeles, LLC (2014) 59 Cal.4th 348, cert. denied, CLS Transp. Los Angeles, LLC v. Iskanian (2015) 574 U.S. 1121, to the extent Iskanian had held a PAGA plaintiff couldn’t be compelled under the Federal Arbitration Act to arbitrate the plaintiff’s individual claims.

The Viking River majority also concluded that arbitration of the individual claims required dismissal of the plaintiff’s representative claims because, “as we see it, PAGA provides no mechanism to enable a court to adjudicate non-individual PAGA claims once an individual claim has been committed to a separate proceeding.” (596 U.S. at p. 663.) Last year, the California Supreme Court said the U.S. Supreme Court saw it wrong. In Adolph v. Uber Technologies, Inc. (2023) 14 Cal.5th 1104, the state court became the rock to the SCOTUS scissors (or the paper to the rock, or the scissors to the paper; whatever), concluding mandatory arbitration of an employee’s individual claims against their employer doesn’t preclude the employee from pursuing in court a representative PAGA action on behalf of similarly aggrieved employees.

The Ninth Circuit in Johnson follows the California court’s take. Rejecting an argument that Adolph is inconsistent with Viking River, the federal appeals court concludes “[i]t is axiomatic that a state court has the authority to correct a misinterpretation of that state’s law by a federal court,” says “the California Supreme Court corrected Viking River’s misunderstanding of PAGA,” and rules that California’s high court didn’t “interpret state law in such a manner that it conflicts with supreme federal law.”