Posts in category “Appellate Decisions”

The Fifth and Federal Circuits cannot agree on where appeals of Walker Process claims belong. These claims allege that someone violated the Sherman Act by fraudulently obtaining a patent. The Federal Circuit—which has exclusive jurisdiction over claims arising under the patent laws—thinks that these cases do not arise under the patent laws.…

Litigants sometimes try to create a final, appealable decision by voluntarily dismissing some or all of their claims. These dismissals fall under the banner of manufactured finality, and they come in several forms. A litigant who loses on some claims might voluntarily dismiss its remaining claims and then appeal the loss.…

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.…

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.…

Sometimes litigants are unsatisfied with the existing avenues for interlocutory appeals. So they try to manufacture a final decision, often by voluntarily dismissing some or all of their claims. Manufactured finality comes in a variety of forms. In 2017’s Microsoft Corp. v. Baker, the Supreme Court shut down one of them.…

When an action involves multiple claims, appeals normally must wait until the district court has resolved all of claims. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b) is one exception to this general rule. It permits a district court to enter a partial judgment on the resolution of some (but not all) claims in an action.…

The Supreme Court recently amended Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 3(c). Before these amendments, several courts of appeals had used Rule 3(c)’s order-designation requirement to limit the scope of an appeal. The amendments—which were a necessary fix to a bad misreading of Rule 3(c)—became effective December 1, 2021. The Supreme Court’s order adopting the amendments said that the new rule would “govern in all proceedings in appellate cases thereafter commenced and, insofar as just and practicable, all proceedings then pending.”…

The Class Action Fairness Act (often referred to as “CAFA”) permits the removal of certain class actions brought in state court. CAFA includes a special appellate provision—28 U.S.C. § 1453(c)(1)—which gives the courts of appeals discretion to review a district court order “granting or denying a motion to remand a class action to the State court from which it was removed.”…

28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1) gives the courts of appeals jurisdiction to immediately review many district court decisions involving injunctive relief. But § 1292(a)(1)’s text includes an important qualifier. It applies to “[i]nterlocutory orders of the district courts.” Normally this qualifier does little work. After all, most (if not nearly all) § 1292(a)(1) appeals involve injunctions issued by a district court.…