Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/551/205/dissent.html
Timestamp: 2017-05-29 20:55:17
Document Index: 495931649

Matched Legal Cases: ['§2107', '§2107', '§2107', '§2107', '§2107', '§2107', '§2107', '§2107', '§2101', '§2101']

Bowles v. Russell (Dissent by Justice Souter) :: 551 U.S. 205 (2007) :: Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center Log In
“ ‘Jurisdiction,’ ” we have warned several times in the last decade, “ ‘is a word of many, too many, meanings.’ ” Steel Co. v. Citizens for Better Environment, 523 U. S. 83, 90 (1998) (quoting United States v. Vanness, 85 F. 3d 661, 663, n. 2 (CADC 1996)); Kontrick v. Ryan, 540 U. S. 443, 454 (2004) (quoting Steel Co.); Arbaugh v. Y & H Corp., 546 U. S. 500, 510 (2006) (quoting Steel Co.); Rockwell Int’l Corp. v. United States, 549 U. S. ___, ___ (2007) (slip op., at 9) (quoting Steel Co.). This variety of meaning has insidiously tempted courts, this one included, to engage in “less than meticulous,” Kontrick, supra, at 454, sometimes even “profligate … use of the term,” Arbaugh, supra, at 510.
In recent years, however, we have tried to clean up our language, and until today we have been avoiding the erroneous jurisdictional conclusions that flow from indiscriminate use of the ambiguous word. Thus, although we used to call the sort of time limit at issue here “mandatory and jurisdictional,” United States v. Robinson, 361 U. S. 220, 229 (1960), we have recently and repeatedly corrected that designation as a misuse of the “jurisdiction” label. Arbaugh, supra, at 510 (citing Robinson as an example of improper use of the term “jurisdiction”); Eberhart v. United States, 546 U. S. 12, 17–18 (2005) (per curiam) (same); Kontrick, supra, at 454 (same).
In ruling that Bowles cannot depend on the word of a District Court Judge, the Court demonstrates that no one may depend on the recent, repeated, and unanimous statements of all participating Justices of this Court. Yet more incongruously, all of these pronouncements by the Court, along with two of our cases,[Footnote 6] are jettisoned in a ruling for which the leading justification is stare decisis, see ante, at 4 (“This Court has long held …”).
We have the authority to recognize an equitable exception to the 14-day limit, and we should do that here, as it certainly seems reasonable to rely on an order from a federal judge.[Footnote 7] Bowles, though, does not have to convince us as a matter of first impression that his reliance was justified, for we only have to look as far as Thompson to know that he ought to prevail. There, the would-be appellant, Thompson, had filed post-trial motions 12 days after the District Court’s final order. Although the rules said they should have been filed within 10, Fed. Rules Civ. Proc. 52(b) and 59(b) (1964), the trial court nonetheless had “specifically declared that the ‘motion for a new trial’ was made ‘in ample time.’ ” Thompson, 375 U. S., at 385. Thompson relied on that statement in filing a notice of appeal within 60 days of the denial of the post-trial motions but not within 60 days of entry of the original judgment. Only timely post-trial motions affected the 60-day time limit for filing a notice of appeal, Rule 73(a) (1964), so the Court of Appeals held the appeal untimely. We vacated because Thompson “relied on the statement of the District Court and filed the appeal within the assumedly new deadline but beyond the old deadline.” Id., at 387.
Thompson should control. In that case, and this one, the untimely filing of a notice of appeal resulted from reliance on an error by a district court, an error that caused no evident prejudice to the other party. Actually, there is one difference between Thompson and this case: Thompson filed his post-trial motions late and the District Court was mistaken when it said they were timely; here, the District Court made the error out of the blue, not on top of any mistake by Bowles, who then filed his notice of appeal by the specific date the District Court had declared timely. If anything, this distinction ought to work in Bowles’s favor. Why should we have rewarded Thompson, who introduced the error, but now punish Bowles, who merely trusted the District Court’s statement?[Footnote 8]
Footnote 1 The Court thinks my fellow dissenters and I are forgetful of an opinion I wrote and the others joined in 2003, which referred to the 30-day rule of 28 U. S. C. §2107(a) as a jurisdictional time limit. See ante, at 5 (quoting Barnhart v. Peabody Coal Co., 537 U. S. 149, 160, n. 6 (2003)). But that reference in Barnhart was a perfect example of the confusion of the mandatory and the jurisdictional that the entire Court has spent the past four years repudiating in Arbaugh, Eberhart, and Kontrick. My fellow dissenters and I believe that the Court was right to correct its course; the majority, however, will not even admit that we deliberately changed course, let alone explain why it is now changing course again.
Footnote 2 The requirement that courts of appeals raise jurisdictional issues sU. S.onte reveals further ill effects of today’s decision. Under §2107(c), “[t]he district court may … extend the time for appeal upon a showing of excusable neglect or good cause.” By the Court’s logic, if a district court grants such an extension, the extension’s propriety is subject to mandatory sU. S.onte review in the court of appeals, even if the extension was unopposed throughout, and upon finding error the court of appeals must dismiss the appeal. I see no more justification for such a rule than reason to suspect Congress meant to create it.
Footnote 3 The majority answers that a footnote of our unanimous opinion in Kontrick v. Ryan, 540 U. S. 443 (2004), used §2107(a) as an illustration of a jurisdictional time limit. Ante, at 6 (“[W]e noted that §2107 contains the type of statutory time constraints that would limit a court’s jurisdiction. 540 U. S., at 453, and n. 8”). What the majority overlooks, however, are the post-Kontrick cases showing that §2107(a) can no longer be seen as an example of a jurisdictional time limit. The jurisdictional character of the 30- (or 60)-day time limit for filing notices of appeal under the present §2107(a) was first pronounced by this Court in Browder v. Director, Dept. of Corrections of Ill., 434 U. S. 257 (1978). But in that respect Browder was undercut by Eberhart v. United States, 546 U. S. 12 (2005) (per curiam), decided after Kontrick. Eberhart cited Browder (along with several of the other cases on which the Court now relies) as an example of the basic error of confusing mandatory time limits with jurisdictional limitations, a confusion for which United States v. Robinson, 361 U. S. 220 (1960), was responsible. Compare ante, at 4 (citing Browder, Griggs v. Provident Consumer Discount Co., 459 U. S. 56 (1982) (per curiam), and Hohn v. United States, 524 U. S. 236 (1998)), with Eberhart, supra, at 17–18 (citing those cases as examples of the confusion caused by Robinson’s imprecise language). Eberhart was followed four months later by Arbaugh v. Y & H Corp., 546 U. S. 500 (2006), which summarized the body of recent decisions in which the Court “clarified that time prescriptions, however emphatic, are not properly typed jurisdictional,” id., at 510 (internal quotation marks omitted). This unanimous statement of all Members of the Court participating in the case eliminated the option of continuing to accept §2107(a) as jurisdictional and it precludes treating the 14-day period of §2107(c) as a limit on jurisdiction.
Footnote 4 The Court points out that we have affixed a “jurisdiction” label to the time limit contained in §2101(c) for petitions for writ of certiorari in civil cases. Ante, at 6–7 (citing Federal Election Comm’n v. NRA Political Victory Fund, 513 U. S. 88, 90 (1994); this Court’s Rule 13.2). Of course, we initially did so in the days when we used the term imprecisely. The status of §2101(c) is not before the Court in this case, so I express no opinion on whether there are sufficient reasons to treat it as jurisdictional. The Court’s observation that jurisdictional treatment has had severe consequences in that context, ante, at 7, n. 4, does nothing to support an argument that jurisdictional treatment is sound, but instead merely shows that the certiorari rule, too, should be reconsidered in light of our recent clarifications of what sorts of rules should be treated as jurisdictional.
Footnote 5 With no apparent sense of irony, the Court finds that “ ‘[o]ur later cases … effectively repudiate the Harris Truck Lines approach.’ ” Ante, at 9 (quoting Houston v. Lack, 487 U. S. 266, 282 (1988) (Scalia, J., dissenting); omission in original). Of course, those “later cases” were Browder and Griggs, see Houston, supra, at 282, which have themselves been repudiated, not just “effectively” but explicitly, in Eberhart. See n. 3, supra.
Footnote 6 Three, if we include Wolfsohn v. Hankin, 376 U. S. 203 (1964) (per curiam).
Footnote 7 As a member of the Federal Judiciary, I cannot help but think that reliance on our orders is reasonable. See O. Holmes, Natural Law, in Collected Legal Papers 311 (1920). I would also rest better knowing that my innocent errors will not jeopardize anyone’s rights unless absolutely necessary.
Footnote 8 Nothing in Osterneck v. Ernst & Whinney, 489 U. S. 169 (1989), requires such a strange rule. In Osterneck, we described the “unique circumstances” doctrine as applicable “only where a party has performed an act which, if properly done, would postpone the deadline for filing his appeal and has received specific assurance by a judicial officer that this act has been properly done.” Id., at 179. But the point we were making was that Thompson could not excuse a lawyer’s original mistake in a case in which a judge had not assured him that his act had been timely; the Court of Appeals in Osterneck had found that no court provided a specific assurance, and we agreed. I see no reason to take Osterneck’s language out of context to buttress a fundamentally unfair resolution of an issue the Osterneck Court did not have in front of it. Cf. St. Mary’s Honor Center v. Hicks, 509 U. S. 502, 515 (1993) (“[W]e think it generally undesirable, where holdings of the Court are not at issue, to dissect the sentences of the United States Reports as though they were the United States Code”).
Footnote 9 At first glance it may seem unreasonable for counsel to wait until the penultimate day under the judge’s order, filing a notice of appeal being so easy that counsel should not have needed the extra time. But as Bowles’s lawyer pointed out at oral argument, filing the notice of appeal starts the clock for filing the record, see Fed. Rule App. Proc. 6(b)(2)(B), which in turn starts the clock for filing a brief, see Rule 31(a)(1), for which counsel might reasonably want as much time as possible. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 6. A good lawyer plans ahead, and Bowles had a good lawyer.