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In United States v. Rivera-Rodríguez, the First Circuit held that the government can appeal from orders granting a criminal defendant’s request for compassionate release. Although several courts of appeals have reviewed these appeals, few have addressed their jurisdiction to do so in any depth. But the issue requires some thought—as the Rivera-Rodríguez panel noted, “[t]he government has no right of appeal in criminal cases except where a statute expressly grants such a right.”…

In Harris v. Medical Transportation Management, Inc., the D.C. Circuit reviewed (and reversed) a grant of class certification. But it refused to use pendent appellate jurisdiction to review certification of a collective action under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The court explained that class actions and collective actions “are fundamentally different creatures.”…

In In re Municipal Stormwater Pond Coordinated Litigation, a split Eighth Circuit held that it lacked jurisdiction to review the resolution of some claims when the parties conditionally dismissed other claims.

The parties agreed that, should the Eighth Circuit reverse, the voluntarily dismissed claims could be reinstated. But if the Eighth Circuit affirmed, the voluntarily dismissed claims were forever lost.…

In Parrish v. United States, a divided Fourth Circuit dismissed an appeal because the would-be appellant did not file a second notice of appeal after the district court reopened the appeal time under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(6). An earlier notice of appeal—which the Fourth Circuit had construed as a motion to reopen the appeal time—was insufficient.…

In Selective Insurance Company of America v. Westfield Insurance Company, the Fourth Circuit dismissed an interlocutory appeal from a duty-to-defend decision. The court assumed—as other courts have held—that duty-to-defend orders can be appealable injunctions under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1). But the underlying litigation in Selective Insurance (that is, the litigation in which the insured was seeking a defense) was resolved while the duty-to-defend appeal was pending.…

June was arbitration-appeals month. In its third and last decision of the term relating to appellate jurisdiction, the Supreme Court held that district courts must stay proceedings on the merits pending an interlocutory arbitration appeal. In the courts of appeals, the Third Circuit reviewed the denial of a motion to dismiss that effectively sought arbitration.…

In Coinbase, Inc., v. Bielski, the Supreme Court held that district courts must stay proceedings on the merits once a party appeals from the denial of arbitration. The Court determined that 9 U.S.C. § 16—which authorizes these appeals—was enacted against Griggs v. Provident Consumer Discount Co.’s background principal that a district court loses control over all aspects of a case that are on appeal.…

May was quite a month for appellate jurisdiction.

We saw two Supreme Court decisions—one on preserving legal issues via denied summary-judgment motions, and one on the non-jurisdictionality of immigration exhaustion. And the government has agreed that cert is appropriate to address the reviewability of exceptional-hardship determinations in immigration appeals.

In the courts of appeals, there were significant decisions on the scope of Rule 41—does it apply only to entire actions or also to discrete claims?—and…

I’ve been following the circuit split over preserving purely legal issues via denied summary-judgment motions for some time. Now, the Supreme Court has finally resolved it. In Dupree v. Younger, the Court held that a denied summary-judgment motion preserves a purely legal issue. Litigants thus do not need to re-raise those issues in post-trial motions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50.…

For years, several courts of appeals limited the scope of an appeal to the orders designated in a notice of appeal. Recent amendments to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 3(c) were supposed to end that practice. These amendments took effect in December 2021. Yet some courts have overlooked these changes, continuing to apply caselaw that the amendments abrogated.…