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Last week, the Seventh Circuit addressed finality and consolidated complaints in the shaky-cheese multidistrict litigation. The en banc Eleventh Circuit elected to re-examine its law on appealing the state-action antitrust defense. In cert-stage developments, the Supreme Court received a second petition on the scope of § 1447(d) remand appeals and a new petition on the use of mandamus in criminal cases.…

Actions consolidated in multidistrict litigation (or MDL) normally retain their individual character for finality purposes. So the resolution of a single action in an MDL is final and appealable regardless of whether other actions remain pending.

Things can get complicated, however, if the parties file consolidated pleadings after the actions are joined in the MDL.…

Last summer, in SmileDirectClub, LLC v. Battle, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed an interlocutory denial of a state-action antitrust/Parker defense. The decision produced three different opinions on appellate jurisdiction. The majority applied long-standing Eleventh Circuit law holding that these denials are immediately appealable via the collateral-order doctrine. Dissenting, Judge Tjoflat argued that the order in SmileDirectClub did not conclusively decide the Parker issue, such that the collateral-order doctrine did not apply.…

Last week saw several courts hold that they lacked jurisdiction over a variety of appeals. Indeed, I found only one case of note in which the court actually had appellate jurisdiction. Still, there are some interesting decisions, including an illustration of the odd “colorable” requirement for double jeopardy appeals. Let’s start with an appeal from two post-judgment orders, one timely and one not.…

The holiday week produced two decisions of note. In one, the Eleventh Circuit held that a judgment on the merits of a Fair Labor Standards Act claim is final despite any outstanding issues of attorneys’ fees. And the Third Circuit applied its rule that litigants can immediately appeal Rhines stays in habeas cases.…

Last week, a Sixth Circuit concurrence offered a new approach to finality for bankruptcy appeals. The First Circuit added denials of special motions under Maine’s anti-SLAPP law to the list of appealable collateral orders. The Eleventh Circuit told litigants that they have to accept the consequences of waiving the right to amend so that they could appeal.…

Appellate jurisdiction in bankruptcy cases can get complicated. The rules of finality are different in bankruptcy. And bankruptcy involves an extra tier of intermediate appellate review: litigants initially appeal bankruptcy court decisions to either a district court or a Bankruptcy Appellate Panel. Litigants can then seek further review in the courts of appeals.…

There’s little to report from last week. The First Circuit granted rehearing in a decision that cut back on the relation forward of notices of appeal. But the new decision avoided the jurisdictional issue because the merits were straightforward. And a divided Sixth Circuit affirmed the denial of qualified immunity, with the majority and dissent disagreeing over what facts must be taken as true for purposes of the appeal.…

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument on the finality of denied requests to reopen benefits decisions for railroad workers. The Tenth Circuit joined every other circuit in holding that it could not review a remand order when post-removal joinder destroyed diversity jurisdiction. The Eighth Circuit allowed an appellant to cure a finality problem—during oral argument—by converting a voluntary dismissal to one with prejudice.…

After several quiet weeks in the world of federal appellate jurisdiction, things picked up. The First Circuit became the fourth court to recently endorse a limited scope of remand appeals under § 1447(d), although the Supreme Court might have more to say on this issue soon. The Sixth Circuit created a split on the jurisdictionality of bankruptcy’s appeal deadline, holding that the part-statute, part-rule deadline is a non-jurisdictional claim-processing rule.…