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Injunction appeals have been in the spotlight of late. We’ve seen a few recent decisions on appeals from temporary restraining orders. And this month has already produced three cases involving effective denials of preliminary injunctions.

One of these cases raised a question about the test for effective—and thus appealable—injunction denials.…

In Abraham Watkins Nichols Agosto Aziz & Stogner v. Festeryga, the en banc Fifth Circuit held that 28 U.S.C. § 1447(d) does not bar review of waiver-based remands. In so holding, the court overruled its decision in In re Weaver.…

In Amazon.com Services LLC v. NLRB, the Fifth Circuit split over whether a party could appeal from the district court’s delay in deciding a preliminary-injunction motion. The would-be appellant sought to enjoin an order that it file a brief in an NLRB proceeding. When the deadline for that brief arrived, the district court had not yet decided the injunction motion.…

April saw more decisions on whether temporary restraining orders were appealable injunctions. The Eleventh Circuit addressed the immediate appealability of Florida’s litigation privileges. And another court of appeals held that defendants cannot immediately appeal from the denial of a church-autonomy defense.

Let’s start, however, with a particularly interested decision on what counts as a claim for purposes of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b).…

In Diaz v. FCA US LLC, the Third Circuit split over whether a district court had resolved distinct claims for purposes of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b). The majority concluded that the district court had resolved only a distinct theory of recovery, not a distinct claim. Dissenting, Judge Phipps argued that claims are defined by their elements, and the resolved and unresolved claims in the case had distinct elements.…

In Grippa v. Rubin, the Eleventh Circuit addressed the immediate appealability of Florida’s absolute and qualified litigation privileges. The court determined that the absolute privilege was immediately appealable via the collateral-order doctrine. But the qualified litigation privilege was not.…

Last month featured a Sixth Circuit debate over jurisdiction to review Brady issues in appeals from the denial of qualified immunity. There was also an especially odd Second Circuit decision in which the court exercised pendent appellate jurisdiction over a normally non-appealable issue even though the court lacked jurisdiction over any other issue.…

In two appeals—Clark v. Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government and Salter v. City of Detroit, the Sixth Circuit spoke at length about its jurisdiction to review certain Brady issues as part of qualified-immunity appeals. The cases produced a total of six opinions, several of which dove into this jurisdictional issue.…

In Rossy v. City of Buffalo, the Second Circuit appeared to both dismiss a qualified-immunity appeal for a lack of jurisdiction and exercise pendent appellate jurisdiction over a plaintiff’s cross-appeal. This is odd. Pendent appellate jurisdiction allows normally non-appealable issues to tag along with appealable ones. But if the denial of qualified immunity was not appealable, there was nothing for the plaintiff’s appeal to piggyback on.…

I’ve frequently written about the problem of fact-based qualified-immunity appeals both on this website and in my research. I recently decided to collect some new data on how much needless delay these appeals add to civil-rights litigation.

I had done something similar a few years ago when writing about the need to sanction defendants for taking fact-based qualified-immunity appeals.…