Supreme Court clarifies right of appeal in consolidated cases

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Supreme Court clarifies right of appeal in consolidated cases

March 27, 2018 12:30:40 pm

The US Supreme Court [official website] on Tuesday unanimously held [opinion, PDF] that a final decision in one of several consolidated cases confers upon the losing party the immediate right to appeal, notwithstanding the status of any of the other cases in the consolidated group.

The question concerned the fallout between family members that led to Ethlyn Hall filing a suit against her son Samuel Hall for mismanagement of her legal affairs (the fiduciary case). Ethlyn subsequently designated her daughter Elsa Hall as the successor to a trust into which she had transferred her property. Upon Ethlyn’s death, Elsa became the trustee and became the plaintiff in her mother’s case against her brother Samuel. Samuel then filed a separate suit against Elsa in her individual capacity (the individual case). The district court consolidated the two cases and held a single trial for both.

The jury returned a verdict for Samuel in the individual case, but the district court granted a new trial. The fiduciary case was decided against Elsa and Elsa’s attempt to appeal this decision became the focus of the case before the Supreme Court. Samuel moved to dismiss the appeal on jurisdictional grounds arguing that the “judgment in the [fiduciary] case was not final and appealable because his claims against Elsa remained unresolved in the individual case.” The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit [official website] agreed and dismissed the appeal.

The Supreme Court reversed, pointing to the ambiguity of the word “consolidate” in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 42(a) (FRCP) [text] within the context of this case. The Court referred to the history of the predecessor statute to FRCP 42 and stated that this history “makes clear that when one of several consolidated cases is finally decided, a disappointed litigant is free to seek review of that decision in the court of appeals.”

The Supreme Court rejected Samuel’s argument that the word “consolidate” took on a different meaning in FRCP 42(a) from that of its predecessor statute [text, PDF] and added that Samuel’s claimed distinction between limited-purpose consolidation in Rule 42(a)(1) and full-purpose consolidation in Rule 42(a)(2) is of no merit. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., writing for a unanimous Court, concluded:

Nothing in the pertinent Committee proceedings supports the notion that Rule 42(a) was meant to overturn the settled understanding of consolidation … The limited extent to which this Court has addressed consolidation since adoption of Rule 42(a) confirms that the traditional understanding remains in place. … None of this means that district courts may not consolidate cases for “all purposes” in appropriate circumstances. District courts enjoy substantial discretion in deciding whether and to what extent to consolidate cases that a final decision in one is immediately appealable by the losing party. What our decision does mean is that constituent cases retain their separate identities at least to the extent that a final decision in one is immediately appealable by the losing party.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.