In today’s interconnected economy, commerce often involves transportation of goods from facilities in one state, across state lines, to local destinations in another state. Angelo Brock is a “last-mile” delivery driver who performs the final link in this chain of transportation. Mr. Brock transported baked goods manufactured by Flowers Foods that had been shipped from other states to local retailers in Colorado. When he sued Flowers Foods for misclassifying him as an independent contractor, Flowers sought to keep his case out of court by moving to compel arbitration. Although Congress made agreements to arbitrate enforceable in the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), it also exempted from arbitration “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” Both the District Court and the Tenth Circuit held that Mr. Brock was exempt from arbitration because he was “engaged in . . . interstate commerce.” Flowers asked the Supreme Court to hear this case, and the Court agreed to do so.

In January 2026, the Constitutional Accountability Center filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court in support of Mr. Brock. Our brief explains that last-mile drivers are engaged in interstate commerce within the meaning of the FAA for two main reasons.

First, the ordinary meaning of the FAA at the time of its enactment exempts workers like Mr. Brock from arbitration. Legal dictionaries published contemporaneous with the FAA’s passage defined “interstate commerce” to include purely local transportation that formed part of a greater interstate journey. For example, the Cyclopedic Law Dictionary explained that a “shipment from one state to another under a contract for continuous carriage is interstate commerce, even as to so much of the journey as is within the limits of a single state.” Legal dictionaries of the era similarly explained that the conceptually analogous term “foreign commerce” included purely domestic legs of a good’s importation from or exportation to a foreign country.

Second, judicial precedent at the time of the FAA’s enactment confirms that last-mile delivery drivers were understood to be engaged in “interstate commerce.” In interpreting existing statutes with materially similar language—like the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, the Interstate Commerce Act, the Sherman Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act—the Supreme Court consistently held that purely local movement “in the course of [a good’s] transportation” to an “originally intended” destination in “another state” constituted interstate commerce. Workers responsible for that transportation were thus engaged in interstate commerce. Likewise, the Court’s cases interpreting the Commerce Clause establish that goods were “in interstate commerce” when their purely intrastate deliveries formed one link in a chain of “continuous transportation” from the place of origin to the destination in another state.

For these reasons, Flowers’s contention that only workers who themselves cross state lines or interact with vehicles that have crossed state lines has no basis in the FAA’s text and history.