Judge Hamilton on Abuse-of-Discretion Review

The standard of review is an essential part of any appeal; you cannot know whether the district court erred without knowing how the court of appeals will look at the district court’s decision. This is particularly true of abuse-of-discretion review. Discretion necessarily means that there is more than one affirm-able answer. Abuse-of-discretion review asks only whether the district court picked from among the acceptable answers. So even if the judges on the court of appeals might have decided the matter differently, the district court did not err so long as it was within the realm of reasonable decisions.

Mayle v. State of Illinois—a recent Seventh Circuit decision authored by Judge Hamilton—offers an excellent explanation (and illustration) of abuse-of-discretion review.

The district court’s decision to extend the appeal deadline in Mayle

Mayle involved a constitutional challenge to Illinois’s laws prohibiting “bigamy, adultery, and fornication.” The district court dismissed the plaintiff’s claims on preclusion and standing grounds. The plaintiff then had 30 days to file his notice of appeal.

He didn’t do so. But 2 days after the 30-day time for appealing had expired, the plaintiff sought to extend that time under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(5)(A) and 28 U.S.C. § 2107(c). Those provisions give district courts discretion to extend the appeal deadline due to “excusable neglect or good cause.” The plaintiff in Mayle offered two grounds for the extension:

First, since he changed his address in January 2018, his mail had been “misrouted or not forwarded to the proper address.” Second, a business trip in the week leading up to the deadline had “delayed him from access to his legal filings.”

The district court summarily granted the extension without explanation, and the plaintiff filed a notice of appeal. But on appeal, Illinois argued that the district court erred in extending the appeal deadline, which would make the plaintiff’s appeal untimely.

Reviewing the extension of the appellate deadline

The Seventh Circuit rejected the state’s argument. The decision to extend the time for filing an appeal is discretionary. So, the Seventh Circuit explained, “[t]he district court had considerable leeway in deciding whether [the grounds for extending the appeal deadline] demonstrated ‘excusable neglect.’” The district court’s assessment of those grounds needed only to be reasonable:

Reasonable judges could differ on whether to excuse [the plaintiff]’s neglect. It was up to the district court—not an appellate court—to decide whether to [do so].

The court of appeals accordingly did not need to “apply close appellate scrutiny to such a routine and discretionary call as this one by a busy district judge.”

It might be that the Seventh Circuit did not find compelling the plaintiff’s reasons for missing the appeal deadline; had the panel members been sitting in the district court’s shoes, they might have decided the issue differently. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered for abuse-of-discretion review was whether there was some “evident path from the record to the district court’s discretionary decision.” And given the record, either decision by the district court—allowing or not allowing the extension—would have been acceptable. So “[t]he district judge would not have abused his discretion if he had denied the extension, but he also did not abuse his discretion by granting it.”

That all being said, deferential review does not mean no review. Illustrating that point, the Seventh Circuit distinguished its recent decision in Nestorovic v. Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, which held that a district court erred in summarily granting a motion to extend the appeal deadline. (Nestorovic also held that the requirement for showing excusable neglect or good cause was jurisdictional.) The appellant in Nestorovic had offered no reason for extending the deadline, and the court’s review of the record did not reveal any. The district court in Nestorovic had therefore abused its discretion, as “the record contain[ed] no evidence on which it could have rationally based its decision.”

Mayle v. State of Illinois, 2020 WL 1949278 (7th Cir. Apr. 23, 2020), available at the Seventh Circuit and Westlaw.