Caterpillar’s Forum-Selection Clause Won’t Get High Court Review

The U.S. Supreme Court won’t review whether employers can force lawsuits over workers’ benefits into the employers’ preferred court.

The denial leaves standing a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upholding a forum-selection clause in Caterpillar Inc.'s health plan that forced a former employee who filed suit in Pennsylvania to litigate his case in a federal court in Illinois—a location more than 700 miles away from where he lived.

This is the third year in a row that the high court has declined to review whether forum-selection clauses—provisions in employee benefit plans that limit the ...