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Pendent appellate jurisdiction allows a court of appeals to extend jurisdiction over a decision that would not normally be immediately appealable when the court has jurisdiction over another, related decision. Used almost entirely in the context of interlocutory appeals, pendent appellate jurisdiction says that the normally non-appealable issue piggybacks on the appealable one.…

It was another packed week of appellate-jurisdiction decisions, particularly in the Sixth Circuit. Let’s start with one of my favorite topics, cumulative finality.…

Lots of decisions this week. Let’s start with a pair of cases that rejected municipalities’ attempts to tag along with their employees’ qualified-immunity appeals.…

Last week had a bunch of decisions of note. Let’s jump right in with orders transferring a motion to quash a subpoena.…

Last week, the Fifth Circuit addressed non-party discovery appeals and the time for appealing interlocutory orders. The Sixth Circuit allowed the disclaim-on-appeal tactic to save an appeal after some claims were dismissed without prejudice. That court also refused to relate forward a notice of appeal filed after a magistrate judge’s report and recommendation.…

In Leonard v. Martin, a split Fifth Circuit held that non-parties cannot use the collateral-order doctrine to immediately appeal discovery orders that reject a claim of undue burden. Other avenues for immediate review—certified appeals under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b), writs of mandamus, and contempt appeals—were available. The majority accordingly concluded that collateral-order appeals were unnecessary to ensure meaningful review of orders denying motions to quash on undue-burden grounds.…

In Ueckert v. Guerra, the Fifth Circuit held that an appeal from the denial of qualified immunity was untimely, as it came 412 days after the district court’s bench ruling. In the course of doing so, the court explained that the defendant had 180 days to appeal this denial. That’s because the district court never set out its denial of immunity in a separate document.…

There’s not a lot to talk about from last week. In a footnote, the Supreme Court added another type of order to the list of immediately appealable collateral orders. And the Tenth Circuit explained its caselaw on fact-based absolute-immunity appeals.…

In Tuesday’s Shoop v. Twyford, the Supreme Court reversed an order that required the state to transport a habeas petitioner from his prison to a hospital for medical testing. Before doing so, the Court had to explain how the Sixth Circuit had jurisdiction to immediately review this order. In a footnote, the Supreme Court said that the order was immediately appealable via the collateral-order doctrine.…

The to-the-point roundups of summer 2022 continue with a double-sized edition. Highlights include using Scott v. Harris’s blatant-contradiction exception to disregard allegations in a complaint and the appealability of Title VII’s ministerial-exception defense.…