Cert Grant on Derivative-Sovereign-Immunity Appeals

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.

In Ashley v. Clay County, the Fifth Circuit held that a municipal defendant could appeal a district court’s refusal to resolve an immunity defense despite the district court’s ordering arbitration.

In McEvoy v. Diversified Energy Co., the Fourth Circuit dismissed a somewhat convoluted invocation of sovereign immunity. The defendants appealed to argue that a district court’s Rule 19 decision effectively denied a non-party’s sovereign immunity. But the defendant had never itself sought immunity. Nor had the actual immunity holder intervened to protect its interests. The […]

In Amisi v. Brooks, the Fourth Circuit held that defendants can immediately appeal from the refusal to dismiss a claim as barred by the Virginia Workers’ Compensation Act. The court thought that the Act provided an immunity from litigation. And that, apparently, was all that was necessary for an appeal via the collateral-order doctrine. But […]

In Solomon v. St. Joseph Hospital, the Second Circuit skipped over appellate-jurisdiction issues to address the district court’s subject-matter jurisdiction. On its face, the opinion suggests that litigants can take interlocutory appeals to challenge federal subject-matter jurisdiction. This would be a massive—and likely inadvertent—expansion of interlocutory appeals.

May saw several decisions on effective injunction denials. One of those decisions raised an interesting question about the Supreme Court’s test for when a district court order effective denies a preliminary injunction. In other developments, the Fifth Circuit sat en banc to jettison its rule barring review of waiver-based remands. Other decisions addressed the finality […]

In Heidi Group, Inc.v. Texas Health and Human Services Commission, the Fifth Circuit reviewed the denial of federal and state immunities but declined to exercise pendent appellate jurisdiction over other issues. In the course of doing so, one judge questioned the collateral-order doctrine’s application to state immunities, and the entire court questioned the doctrine of […]

The Supreme Court granted cert in GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal. The case asks if defendants can immediately appeal from the denial of derivative sovereign immunity via the collateral-order doctrine. I wrote about the petition and the underlying circuit split earlier this year. And I wrote about the Tenth Circuit decision from which the petition stems […]

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. Under the Supreme Court’s decision […]

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.