Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/558bv.pdf
Page Number: 268

Cite as: 558 U. S. 100 (2009) 

107 

Opinion of the Court 

police  the  prejudgment  tactics  of  litigants]  if  the  appellate 
courts do not repeatedly intervene to second-guess prejudg­
ment rulings”). 

The  justiﬁcation  for  immediate  appeal  must  therefore  be 
sufﬁciently  strong  to  overcome  the  usual  beneﬁts  of  defer­
ring  appeal  until  litigation  concludes.  This  requirement 
ﬁnds expression in two of the three traditional Cohen condi­
tions.  The  second  condition  insists  upon  “important  ques­
tions  separate  from  the  merits.”  Swint,  514  U. S.,  at  42 
(emphasis  added).  More  signiﬁcantly,  “the  third  Cohen 
question, whether a right is ‘adequately vindicable’ or ‘effec­
tively  reviewable,’  simply  cannot  be  answered  without  a 
judgment about the value of the interests that would be lost 
through  rigorous  application  of  a  ﬁnal  judgment  require­
ment.”  Digital  Equipment,  511  U. S.,  at  878–879.  That  a 
ruling  “may  burden  litigants  in  ways  that  are  only  imper­
fectly reparable by appellate reversal of a ﬁnal district court 
judgment . . . has never sufﬁced.”  Id., at 872.  Instead, the 
decisive  consideration  is  whether  delaying  review  until  the 
entry  of  ﬁnal  judgment  “would  imperil  a  substantial  public 
interest”  or  “some  particular  value  of  a  high  order.”  Will, 
546 U. S., at 352–353. 

In making this determination, we do not engage in an “in­
dividualized  jurisdictional  inquiry.”  Coopers  &  Lybrand  v. 
Livesay,  437  U. S.  463,  473  (1978).  Rather,  our  focus  is  on 
“the  entire  category  to  which  a  claim  belongs.”  Digital 
Equipment, 511 U. S., at 868.  As long as the class of claims, 
taken  as  a  whole,  can  be  adequately  vindicated  by  other 
means,  “the  chance  that  the  litigation  at  hand  might  be 
speeded,  or  a  ‘particular  injustic[e]’  averted,”  does  not  pro­
vide a basis for jurisdiction under § 1291.  Ibid. (quoting Van 
Cauwenberghe  v.  Biard,  486  U. S.  517,  529  (1988);  alteration 
in original). 

B 

In  the  present  case,  the  Court  of  Appeals  concluded  that 
the District Court’s privilege-waiver order satisﬁed the ﬁrst