The Week in Federal Appellate Jurisdiction: November 7–13, 2021

It’s the fourth annual winter-break edition of the weekly roundup. As I have in previous years, I took a few weeks off from Final Decisions. But I’m back with a roundup covering the last three weeks of 2022. Those weeks saw a pair of collateral-order decisions, the effect of Nasrallah v. Barr on other kinds […]

There were three cases of note from last week. The Third Circuit held that notices of appeal do not encompass post-notice decisions. Litigants must file a second notice, or amend the first, to appeal those decisions. The D.C. Circuit held that it could not review a facial challenge to a statute in an injunction appeal […]

There were a bunch of interesting decisions last week. In the continuing saga of the Rule 3(c) amendments, the Second Circuit acknowledged them and applied them retroactively. In other decisions, the Sixth Circuit explained that it could review class certification in an appeal from a class-wide injunction. The Fourth Circuit clarified the basis for its […]

I took a break from the roundup last week, but I’m back with a double-sized edition. In the last two weeks, another circuit didn’t recognize that the recent Rule 3(c) amendments abrogated its caselaw. The Eleventh Circuit determined that a stay put an action in “suspended animation,” thereby allowing an appeal from the stay. The […]

Last week, the Tenth Circuit once again used a pro se plaintiff’s notice of appeal to limit the scope of its review despite recent amendments to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 3(c). The Second Circuit gave a thorough explanation of its jurisdiction over decisions made in post-judgment proceedings. The Fifth Circuit heard an appeal from […]

In two appeals—Clark v. Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government and Salter v. City of Detroit, the Sixth Circuit spoke at length about its jurisdiction to review certain Brady issues as part of qualified-immunity appeals. The cases produced a total of six opinions, several of which dove into this jurisdictional issue.

In Rossy v. City of Buffalo, the Second Circuit appeared to both dismiss a qualified-immunity appeal for a lack of jurisdiction and exercise pendent appellate jurisdiction over a plaintiff’s cross-appeal. This is odd. Pendent appellate jurisdiction allows normally non-appealable issues to tag along with appealable ones. But if the denial of qualified immunity was not […]

I’ve frequently written about the problem of fact-based qualified-immunity appeals both on this website and in my research. I recently decided to collect some new data on how much needless delay these appeals add to civil-rights litigation. I had done something similar a few years ago when writing about the need to sanction defendants for […]

Yesterday, I filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in Parrish v. United States, which is currently pending before the Supreme Court. The case asks if an appellant must file a new notice of appeal after the district court reopens the time to appeal under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(6). Both the […]

Last month saw another rejection of pure Bivens appeals, an analysis of Perlman appeals in the grand-jury context, and a ruling on mandatory stays during a remand appeal. Plus an odd sovereign-immunity appeal, appeals without the express resolution of all claims, and much more.