C.N. v. Sigma Delta Tau Society: The Second Department Begins to Define the Reach of the EFAA

A Case of First Impression Explains Why the Ending Forced Arbitration Act Turns on the Relationship Between the Case and the Sexual-Misconduct Dispute, Not the Label Attached to the Cause of Action

The Appellate Division, Second Department’s September 23, 2026 decision in C.N. v. Sigma Delta Tau Society, 2026 N.Y. Slip Op. 05405 (2d Dep’t Sept. 23, 2026), deserves far more attention than its immediate procedural posture might suggest. The appeal arose from an order compelling arbitration under CPLR 7503(a), but the real issue was much larger: how broadly the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 (“EFAA”), 9 U.S.C. §§ 401–402, reaches when the defendant demanding arbitration did not itself commit the alleged sexual assault and the pleaded cause of action against that defendant sounds only in negligence. The Second Department expressly identified that question as one of first impression and held that the EFAA can bar arbitration under those circumstances.

That holding is important because the court did not resolve the appeal by creating a narrow exception for fraternity or sorority litigation. Instead, it undertook a careful examination of the EFAA’s text, legislative history, and developing federal jurisprudence and, in doing so, supplied a meaningful analytical framework for New York courts and practitioners. The opinion begins with Olivieri v. Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., 112 F.4th 74, 77 (2d Cir. 2024), where the Second Circuit explained that Congress amended the Federal Arbitration Act in 2022 so that predispute arbitration agreements became invalid and unenforceable, at the election of the complainant, in qualifying sexual-assault and sexual-harassment cases. The Second Department then moved through the statute itself, Congress’s reasons for enacting it, the meaning of “relates to” and “involving,” and a growing body of federal decisions—including Delo v. Paul Taylor Dance Foundation, Inc., 685 F. Supp. 3d 173 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), P.C. v. Driscoll, 2026 WL 699896 (D.N.J. Mar. 12, 2026), Bulic v. Celebrity Cruises, Inc., 2025 WL 1783865 (S.D. Fla. June 27, 2025), Polen v. API Group Life Safety USA, LLC, 2025 WL 3251349 (D. Or. Nov. 21, 2025), Childress v. Moore, 2026 WL 1618598 (M.D. Fla. June 5, 2026), and Hankins v. Burlington Stores, Inc., 2026 WL 1480393 (E.D.N.Y. May 27, 2026)—to explain why the EFAA cannot be confined to claims formally denominated sexual assault or sexual harassment.

That is the real value of C.N. The decision tells the bar that the EFAA is not a pleading-label statute. It is a dispute-focused statute. Congress did not protect only causes of action that themselves contain the words “sexual assault” or “sexual harassment.” It protected qualifying cases that relate to sexual-assault or sexual-harassment disputes. Once that distinction is understood, the result in C.N. follows directly from the statutory text.

Congress Chose “Dispute,” “Case,” “Involving,” and “Relates To” for a Reason

The plaintiff in C.N. was a student at SUNY Cortland and a member of Sigma Delta Tau. According to the complaint, a fraternity chapter hosted an off-campus mixer on September 14, 2023, and the plaintiff was “expected and obligated” by the sorority to attend. The complaint alleged that the fraternity provided alcohol and other intoxicating substances, that the plaintiff became impaired, and that a fraternity member later took her to a nearby premises where he sexually assaulted her. The plaintiff did not sue Sigma Delta Tau for committing the assault. She alleged that the sorority was negligent, reckless, and careless in requiring its members to attend the mixer, that it knew or should have known the fraternity had a history of inappropriate and dangerous conduct, and that it failed adequately to supervise and protect its members at the event. She separately sued the alleged assailant and the fraternity.

Sigma Delta Tau moved to compel arbitration based upon a membership agreement providing that virtually any dispute against the sorority would be resolved by arbitration in Indiana. Supreme Court granted the motion and stayed the action. The appellate question therefore was not whether the EFAA can bar arbitration of a direct sexual-assault claim against the alleged assailant. That proposition follows readily from the statute. The harder question was whether Congress intended the EFAA to reach a negligence action against a different actor whose alleged wrongdoing was said to have created or contributed to the conditions under which the sexual assault occurred.

The Second Department began with the statutory language. Section 402(a) provides that, at the election of the person alleging conduct constituting a sexual-harassment or sexual-assault dispute, no predispute arbitration agreement or predispute joint-action waiver is valid or enforceable “with respect to a case” filed under federal, tribal, or state law that “relates to” the qualifying dispute. The EFAA separately defines a “sexual assault dispute” as a dispute “involving a nonconsensual sexual act or sexual contact,” including circumstances where the victim lacks capacity to consent.

Those words create the architecture of the statute. Congress did not write “sexual assault cause of action.” It wrote “sexual assault dispute.” It did not limit the exception to the individual accused of committing the sexual act. It wrote “a case” that “relates to” that dispute. And it defined the qualifying dispute through the word “involving,” not by reference to a closed list of causes of action. The Second Department recognized that those choices cannot be treated as surplusage. The court examined the ordinary meaning of “relate,” which encompasses a relationship, connection, or logical or causal association, and cited District of Columbia v. Greater Washington Board of Trade, 506 U.S. 125, 129 (1992), and Morales v. Trans World Airlines, Inc., 504 U.S. 374, 384 (1992), for the proposition that Congress’s use of “relate to” generally signals expansive language.

The court then examined the term “sexual assault dispute” itself and relied upon Polen, which construed “involving” broadly because a dispute involving sexual assault is one that in some way includes or concerns sexual assault. From those two concepts, the Second Department drew the conclusion that drives the entire opinion: the EFAA reaches legal proceedings that bear a logical connection or nexus to an expansive category of sexual-assault or sexual-harassment disputes, and the statutory language contains no limitation requiring a direct sexual-assault or sexual-harassment claim against the defendant seeking arbitration.

That conclusion is particularly important because it answers an argument defendants will predictably continue to make. A defendant cannot defeat the EFAA merely by isolating its own conduct from the conduct constituting the assault and then announcing that its particular cause of action is negligence, retaliation, discrimination, negligent supervision, negligent retention, or some other theory that does not itself amount to sexual misconduct. The relevant question is broader: does the case relate to the qualifying sexual-assault or sexual-harassment dispute? The distinction between those two inquiries is not semantic. It determines whether the statute has meaningful effect beyond the most obvious direct-assault case.

The Second Department reinforced that reading through the EFAA’s legislative history. Congress enacted the statute against concerns that victims of sexual assault and sexual harassment were being forced into private arbitration systems in which companies could control arbitrator selection, procedural rules, evidentiary rules, costs, confidentiality, and, practically, whether the allegations ever became public. The court quoted legislative materials explaining that the EFAA was intended to restore access to court for persons otherwise locked into private arbitration before any dispute arose. At the same time, Congress did not intend sexual-misconduct allegations to become a device for pulling unrelated claims out of arbitration. Senator Joni Ernst expressly referred to the need for a “key nexus”; Senator Lindsey Graham stated that Congress did not intend to remove unrelated claims from arbitration agreements; and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand responded by pointing directly to the statutory limitation that only disputes that “relate to” sexual-assault or sexual-harassment conduct escape forced arbitration.

That history clarifies the limiting principle. The EFAA is broad, but it is not boundless. The line is not drawn according to the formal title of the cause of action or the identity of the person who committed the sexual act. The line is drawn according to nexus. A genuinely unrelated claim does not become nonarbitrable merely because sexual misconduct is alleged somewhere else in the complaint. But a negligence, retaliation, discrimination, negligent-retention, or institutional-liability claim that is logically or causally connected to the qualifying dispute cannot be excluded from the EFAA simply because it takes a different doctrinal form.

The Federal Cases the Second Department Chose Matter Because They Show Where the Doctrine Is Going

The Second Department’s treatment of the federal cases is one of the most important parts of the opinion because it demonstrates that C.N. is not an isolated state-court construction. The court surveyed decisions from multiple federal jurisdictions and concluded that courts are becoming “widely consistent” in construing the EFAA broadly where the action relates to a qualifying sexual-assault or sexual-harassment dispute. Each of the cases discussed serves a different purpose in the developing framework.

The starting point is Olivieri v. Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc., 112 F.4th 74 (2d Cir. 2024). The Second Department cited Olivieri at the beginning of its EFAA discussion for the basic proposition that Congress rendered predispute arbitration agreements unenforceable, at the complainant’s election, in qualifying sexual-assault and sexual-harassment cases. The importance of Olivieri to practitioners, however, is broader than that introductory proposition. It forms part of the Second Circuit framework that treats the EFAA as directed toward the relationship between the dispute and the underlying sexual misconduct rather than toward the formal title of the claim. That becomes especially important in employment litigation, where sexual harassment may be followed by retaliation, discriminatory treatment, heightened scrutiny, discipline, termination, or other acts that are legally distinct from the initial harassment but remain factually connected to it. C.N. moves the same reasoning into the sexual-assault context and confirms that the inquiry cannot stop merely because the defendant seeking arbitration is alleged to have committed a different wrong.

Delo v. Paul Taylor Dance Foundation, Inc., 685 F. Supp. 3d 173 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), makes the pleading point explicit. The plaintiff asserted retaliation and discrimination claims under federal, state, and city law. The defendants argued that the EFAA did not apply because the plaintiff had not styled any count as sexual harassment. The Southern District rejected that argument because nothing in the EFAA makes applicability turn on how counsel labels the claim; the question is whether the claim relates to conduct alleged to constitute sexual harassment under applicable law. The Second Department quoted that reasoning directly. That should matter greatly in New York employment practice because sexual-harassment disputes rarely remain confined to a single neatly labeled hostile-work-environment count. The litigation often includes retaliation, discriminatory discipline, termination, aiding and abetting, or other theories arising from the same factual course. If labels controlled, identical controversies could produce different arbitration outcomes based entirely upon pleading nomenclature. Delo rejects that result, and C.N. reinforces it.

P.C. v. Driscoll, 2026 WL 699896 (D.N.J. Mar. 12, 2026), addresses another dimension: institutional liability. There, the plaintiff alleged that she was sexually assaulted by a physician during surgery, while the defendants seeking arbitration included the medical practice and other physicians facing claims for medical malpractice, emotional distress, vicarious liability, negligent hiring, negligent retention, negligent supervision, and consumer fraud. Those defendants argued that the EFAA did not apply because they were not the doctor who committed the alleged abuse and because the claims against them arose from different bodies of law. The District of New Jersey rejected the argument because the claims nevertheless related to the sexual-assault dispute. That reasoning directly anticipates C.N.. Institutions frequently face liability for conduct different from the underlying sexual act. An employer may be accused of retaining a known harasser. A medical practice may be accused of ignoring prior complaints. A school may be accused of failing to supervise. A property owner may face negligent-security allegations. The institutional defendant may truthfully say that it did not commit the assault, but under the EFAA that fact does not answer the arbitration question.

Bulic v. Celebrity Cruises, Inc., 2025 WL 1783865 (S.D. Fla. June 27, 2025), addresses still another attempted limitation. The plaintiff asserted negligence and unseaworthiness after allegedly becoming intoxicated during a crew party and being sexually assaulted by another crew member. Celebrity Cruises argued that the EFAA applied only to claims brought under statutes expressly prohibiting sexual assault or sexual harassment. The court rejected that construction, holding that the EFAA’s sexual-assault provision contains no such requirement. That is critical because much litigation arising from sexual assault proceeds through common-law theories—negligence, negligent supervision, negligent retention, negligent hiring, premises liability, medical malpractice, and emotional-distress claims. If the EFAA applied only where the underlying cause of action itself expressly prohibited sexual assault, the statutory text concerning cases that “relate to” a sexual-assault dispute would be substantially narrowed by a restriction Congress never enacted.

Polen v. API Group Life Safety USA, LLC, 2025 WL 3251349 (D. Or. Nov. 21, 2025), supplies perhaps the cleanest formulation of the rule. The Second Department quoted Polen for the proposition that the EFAA requires the dispute itself to involve sexual assault; it does not require the defendant seeking arbitration to have caused or participated in the sexual act. That distinction should become central in EFAA litigation. Liability and arbitrability are separate questions. Whether a defendant personally committed the sexual act may be dispositive of one theory of liability, but it does not determine whether the case against that defendant is related to the sexual-assault dispute for purposes of § 402(a).

Finally, the Second Department cited Childress v. Moore and Hankins v. Burlington Stores, Inc. as part of the emerging national consensus that the EFAA is to be construed broadly where the requisite relationship exists. The significance is not simply numerical. By placing these cases together, the court identified a developing jurisprudential pattern. Federal courts are increasingly rejecting efforts to reduce EFAA analysis to formal labels, direct-perpetrator status, or the particular source of law under which the plaintiff proceeds. They are instead focusing on whether the case actually relates to a qualifying dispute.

That is precisely where the statute directs them.

What C.N. Means for Pleading, Motion Practice, and the Bar

Once the Second Department completed that statutory and doctrinal analysis, applying the rule to the complaint was straightforward. The plaintiff sufficiently alleged a “sexual assault dispute” because the case involved an alleged nonconsensual sexual act. She alleged that she met the fraternity member at the mixer she was expected and obligated to attend, that the fraternity had a history of inappropriate and dangerous conduct, that she became impaired from substances provided at the event, and that she was taken to a neighboring premises where she was sexually assaulted.

The next question was whether the negligence action against Sigma Delta Tau related to that sexual-assault dispute. The court concluded that it did because the plaintiff alleged that the sorority negligently failed to supervise and protect its members at the mixer and that the assault occurred as a result of that failure. According to the pleaded theory, the sorority’s tortious omission helped bring about the circumstances in which the assault occurred. The court therefore found the necessary logical nexus.

Importantly, the court did not erase the distinction between negligence and sexual assault. It recognized that distinction and held it immaterial to the arbitration question because the EFAA asks whether the case relates to the qualifying dispute. Nor did the court hold that every third-party negligence claim arising somewhere near a sexual assault automatically falls within the statute. The claim in C.N. was related because the plaintiff alleged that the sorority placed her in a dangerous circumstance that led to the assault. That pleaded connection supplied the nexus Congress required.

That point provides the most useful guidance for the bar. EFAA litigation should increasingly be understood as nexus litigation. The threshold question is whether the plaintiff has alleged conduct constituting a sexual-assault or sexual-harassment dispute under § 401. If that threshold is satisfied, the next inquiry is whether the case sought to be arbitrated relates to that dispute under § 402(a). The quality of that relationship—not the label placed above the cause of action—should drive the analysis.

For plaintiffs’ counsel, that means the nexus should be pleaded, not assumed. A complaint asserting retaliation after a sexual-harassment complaint should identify the underlying harassment, the protected complaint, the relevant decisionmakers’ knowledge, the adverse conduct, and the relationship between those events. A negligent-retention claim should identify the information the institution allegedly possessed, its failure to act, and the connection between that omission and the later misconduct. A negligent-supervision claim should identify the alleged duty, the known or foreseeable risk, the failure to supervise, and the relationship to the assault. The EFAA should not appear for the first time as a statutory citation in opposition to a motion to compel arbitration when the complaint itself could have made the relationship clear.

For defendants, C.N. suggests that the stronger argument will no longer be that the cause of action is “only negligence” or “only retaliation.” That kind of formalism has now been rejected repeatedly in the authorities the Second Department cited. The more serious defense will concern attenuation. Is the sexual-misconduct allegation genuinely part of the factual and legal basis of the challenged claim, or merely collateral to it? Did the alleged retaliation arise from the sexual-harassment complaint, or from an independent dispute? Did the institution’s alleged negligence bear a real causal or logical relationship to the assault, or is the connection merely temporal? Those are the questions the statutory nexus requirement places at the center of the analysis.

The employment bar should pay particular attention because Olivieri, Delo, Hankins, and now C.N. collectively demonstrate that EFAA disputes will not be confined to traditional sexual-battery cases. Sexual harassment commonly generates retaliation, discrimination, hostile-work-environment, constructive-discharge, aiding-and-abetting, and other theories. If those claims are genuinely related to the qualifying misconduct, defendants cannot assume they remain arbitrable merely because the particular count is not titled “sexual harassment.” Conversely, plaintiffs cannot rely upon the mere presence of sexual-harassment allegations to pull genuinely unrelated disputes out of arbitration. The work will be in demonstrating—or defeating—the nexus.

There is also an important doctrinal point concerning the Federal Arbitration Act itself. The EFAA is not some state-law exception hostile to federal arbitration policy. Congress amended the FAA. The Second Department noted that § 2 generally validates arbitration provisions in contracts involving commerce except as otherwise provided by the EFAA. Enforcing the EFAA therefore does not undermine the FAA. It enforces the FAA as Congress chose to amend it. Congress made the policy decision that persons alleging qualifying sexual misconduct should have the election to proceed in court despite a predispute arbitration agreement. The judicial task is to determine whether the statutory conditions are met, not to preserve arbitration through restrictions Congress did not write.

The Second Department ultimately reversed Supreme Court and denied the defendants’ motion to compel arbitration. But C.N. v. Sigma Delta Tau Society should not be reduced to that result. Its importance is that, in a case of first impression, the court synthesized the EFAA’s text, purpose, and developing federal jurisprudence and began to define how New York courts should approach these disputes.

The statute requires qualifying sexual misconduct. It requires a relationship between the case and that misconduct. It does not require the defendant seeking arbitration to have committed the sexual act. It does not require the cause of action to be formally labeled sexual assault or sexual harassment. It does not require the plaintiff to sue under a statute specifically prohibiting sexual misconduct. And it does not permit unrelated claims to escape arbitration merely because sexual misconduct appears somewhere in the pleadings.

That is a far more disciplined framework than either extreme.

And that is why C.N. matters.

The Second Department did not simply decide whether one college student had to arbitrate one negligence claim in Indiana. It began to tell the New York bar how to litigate the EFAA.

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