Source: https://m.openjurist.org/559/f2d/209
Timestamp: 2020-02-26 04:50:14
Document Index: 193557464

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 1292', '§ 1292', '§ 1292', '§ 1292', '§ 1292', '§ 1291', '§ 1292', '§ 1291', '§ 1292', '§ 1292']

559 F2d 209 Gardner v. Westinghouse Broadcasting Company | OpenJurist
559 F. 2d 209 - Gardner v. Westinghouse Broadcasting Company
559 F2d 209 Gardner v. Westinghouse Broadcasting Company
16 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. 88, 14 Empl. Prac.
Our policy on this question derives, in part, from a balancing of "the inconvenience and costs of piecemeal review on the one hand and the danger of denying justice by delay on the other." Dickinson v. Petroleum Conversion Corp., 338 U.S. 507, 511, 70 S.Ct. 322, 329, 94 L.Ed. 299 (1950). We do not deny the importance of the class determination in many cases. Indeed, we have recently recognized that "class action determination has significant, practical effects on the litigation and an aggrieved party may have a very real interest in securing early appellate review." Link v. Mercedes-Benz, 550 F.2d 860, 862 (3d Cir. 1976) (in banc ) (plurality opinion). But the possible effects of a ruling are not determinative of whether it can be immediately appealed. Evidentiary rulings, for example, can be critically important but they are not the proper subject of an interlocutory appeal. The question is whether the delay in review will work an injustice. In the case of an application for an injunction, especially a preliminary injunction, the urgency of the matter is obvious. The request for an injunction goes to the merits of the case and delayed review may be the practical equivalent of no review. But a class determination does not partake of the same urgency. A decision on class status is wholly procedural. It is normally within the discretion of the trial court, see Link v. Mercedes-Benz,supra, 550 F.2d at 862; it may be conditional, subject to alteration or amendment prior to final judgment, F.R.Civ.P. 23(c)(1); and it does not implicate the merits of the case at all. If, after judgment on the merits, the relief granted is deemed unsatisfactory, the question of class status is fully reviewable. The delay involved is the same delay that accompanies review of all interlocutory procedural rulings in a case, and the delay in no way diminishes the power of the court upon review to afford full relief.
The purposes of § 1292 are narrow. The statute recognizes the necessity "to permit litigants to effectively challenge interlocutory orders of serious, perhaps irreparable, consequence." Baltimore Contractors, Inc. v. Bodinger, 348 U.S. 176, 181, 75 S.Ct. 249, 252, 99 L.Ed. 233 (1955). The statute, however, does not leave the courts free to decide which interlocutory orders are appealable. It sets forth the exceptional orders specifically.4
(T)he order below lacks the potential of drastic and far reaching effect on the rights of the parties which is characteristic of orders which decide the propriety of granting or refusing injunctions. Such potential supplies the rational basis for the incursion upon the general policy proscribing interlocutory appeals in the exceptional situations covered by § 1292. This view has recently been expressed by the Supreme Court in its statement that § 1292 indicates "the purpose to allow appeals from orders other than final judgments when they have a final and irreparable effect on the rights of the parties." Cohen v. Beneficial Indus. Loan Corp., 1949, 337 U.S. 541, 545, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 1225 (93 L.Ed. 1528). Similarly, in this circuit we have said, "The manifest purpose of the statute is to enable a litigant to seek prompt review in an appellate court from an order or decree which in most instances is effective upon its rendition and is drastic and far reaching in effect." Maxwell v. Enterprise Wall Paper Co., 3 Cir., 1942, 131 F.2d 400, 402. Thus, to construe § 1292 as applicable to the present order would unnecessarily divorce the meaning of the language used from its apparent purpose.
The Supreme Court rejected an identical argument concerning the effect of a denial of summary judgment in Switzerland Cheese Association, Inc. v. E. Horne's Market, Inc., 385 U.S. 23, 87 S.Ct. 193, 17 L.Ed.2d 23 (1966). A denial of a motion for summary judgment, said the Court, "is strictly a pretrial order that decides only one thing that the case should go to trial." More generally, the Court emphasized that "(o)rders that in no way touch on the merits of the claim but only relate to pretrial procedures are not in our view 'interlocutory' within the meaning of § 1292(a)(1)." Id. at 25, 87 S.Ct. at 195.
The Supreme Court's decisions in Sosna v. Iowa, 419 U.S. 393, 95 S.Ct. 553, 42 L.Ed.2d 532 (1975) and Board of School Comm'rs v. Jacobs, 420 U.S. 128, 95 S.Ct. 848, 43 L.Ed.2d 74 (1975) provide some guidance as to whether Ms. Gardner would have standing. Sosna involved the constitutionality of Iowa's requirement that a petitioner in a divorce action be a resident of the state for one year prior to the filing of the petition. After the district court had certified the suit as a class action but before the case reached the Supreme Court, the named plaintiff had satisfied the one year residence requirement. The Supreme Court nevertheless held that the suit was justiciable under Article III. "When the District Court certified the propriety of the class action, the class of unnamed persons described in the certification acquired a legal status separate from the interest asserted by appellant." 419 U.S. at 399, 95 S.Ct. at 557. On the other hand, in Jacobs the Supreme Court held the case moot when the named plaintiffs had lost their personal interest in the outcome after the district court purported to certify the suit as a class action. The Court stressed that the district court had not properly certified or even identified the class, and had not adequately determined that the criteria of Rule 23 were satisfied.
Footnote 11 of Sosna was relied on in Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103, 110 at n.11, 95 S.Ct. 854, 861, 43 L.Ed.2d 54. In Pugh, named plaintiffs had been incarcerated without a judicial determination of probable cause. The Supreme Court said that:
At the time the complaint was filed, the named respondents were members of a class of persons detained without a judicial probable cause determination, but the record does not indicate whether any of them were still in custody awaiting trial when the District Court certified the class. Such a showing ordinarily would be required to avoid mootness under Sosna. See Sosna, supra, (419 U.S.) at 402 (95 S.Ct. 553) n.11; (citation omitted). The length of pretrial custody cannot be ascertained at the outset, and it may be ended at any time by release on recognizance, dismissal of the charges, or a guilty plea, as well as by acquittal or conviction after trial. It is by no means certain that any given individual, named as plaintiff, would be in pretrial custody long enough for a district judge to certify the class. Moreover, in this case the constant existence of a class of persons suffering the deprivation is clear. The attorney representing the named respondents is a public defender, and we can safely assume that he has other clients with a continuing live interest in the case.
While footnote 11 does not purport to give an exhaustive description of the circumstances in which certification may be deemed to relate back to the filing of the complaint, it does not expressly allow relation back in circumstances other than those in which a controversy has such an inherently short cycle that a district court could not be expected to rule on a motion for certification before the named plaintiff's personal stake has expired. But the Court's language has not always been narrowly read.2 In Allen v. Likins, 517 F.2d 532 (8th Cir. 1975), the court indicated that relation back is permissible when the district court has unduly delayed its decision on certification. In Frost v. Weinberger, 515 F.2d 57 (2d Cir. 1975), cert. denied, 424 U.S. 958, 96 S.Ct. 1435, 47 L.Ed.2d 364 (1976), Judge Friendly said that the "apparent force" of the general rule stated in Sosna was "largely drained" by footnote 11. In Frost, the widow and two children of a deceased who had been insured under the Social Security Act claimed that the Social Security Administration had deprived them of benefits they deserved without a full evidentiary hearing. After they filed their complaint on behalf of "all persons who now or may in the future be entitled to survivors' benefits under the Act whose benefits have been or may be reduced without a prior hearing," the district court ordered the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to conduct a full hearing on their claims within a month, and the Secretary did so. Subsequently, the court certified the class. The defendants claimed that the case should be dismissed as moot, because the named plaintiffs had already been given the hearing which they claimed was required by due process when the district court certified the class. In rejecting this argument, Judge Friendly said:
But the concern that there might be an interval in which no live interests are before the court is not, in my opinion, a compelling one. In the first place, the fact of the matter is that in any case such as Pugh in which the device of relation back is used there will have been such an interval. It is true that footnote 11 of Sosna does not explicitly allow extension of the relation back device to cases other than those where the controversy tends to dissipate before class certification can be expected, and that the footnote states that the applicability of relation back "may depend . . . especially (upon) the reality of the claim that otherwise the issue would evade review." But it would appear that to the extent the "capable of repetition, yet evading review" criterion would be relevant to justiciability, it would bear on the "discretionary decision whether to reach the merits of an issue, rather than (the) Art. III 'case or controversy' requirement." Franks v. Bowman Transp. Co., 424 U.S. 747, 781, 96 S.Ct. 1251, 1272, 47 L.Ed.2d 444 (Powell, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part).
In some circumstances, the "capable of repetition, yet evading review" criterion is relevant to whether Article III has been satisfied. In Weinstein v. Bradford, 423 U.S. 147, 149, 96 S.Ct. 347, 349, 46 L.Ed.2d 350 (1975), the Court said:
I find any argument that there should be such a requirement unconvincing. There is no reason why holding a case in abeyance until live interests come before the court should mean that the case will not go forward with the necessary concreteness and adverseness. See Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83, 99, 88 S.Ct. 1942, 20 L.Ed.2d 947 (1968). I would view any contention that a court must at all times have a live plaintiff before it and cannot consider adding new interests to repair any deficiency as barren of reality. This is not to say that the class may be certified at any time, but merely that Article III does not divest courts of all discretion to consider adding new parties even after final judgment after it appears that former parties have lost their personal stake.5
The Supreme Court has apparently never expressed, or been asked to express, any view on the theory that the putative named plaintiff of a class action has a personal interest which stems from the fact that he is a fiduciary with respect to the members of the class. But there are several indicia of the fact that filing an action with a request for class treatment imposes a fiduciary responsibility upon the putative named plaintiff: 1) even before class certification, the action may not be settled or dismissed without court approval,7 Kahan v. Rosenstiel, 424 F.2d 161 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, 398 U.S. 950, 90 S.Ct. 1870, 26 L.Ed.2d 290 (1970), 2) F.R.Civ.P. 23(a)(4) requires as a prerequisite for certification that "the representative parties will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class", 3) F.R.Civ.P. 23(d) (2) gives the court power to issue orders "requiring, for the protection of the members of the class or otherwise for the fair conduct of the action, that notice be given in such manner as the court may direct to some or all of the members of any step in the action, or of the proposed extent of the judgment, or of the opportunity of members to signify whether they consider the representation fair and adequate, to intervene and present claims or defenses, or otherwise to come into the action," see Knuth v. Erie-Crawford Dairy Co-op. Assoc., 395 F.2d 420 (3d Cir. 1968). The fiduciary responsibility of representative parties also, in my view, explains why class representatives may ever raise matters bearing on the interests of class members even though they have no tangible personal interest in these matters including the very question of class certification.
As Judge Aldisert's opinion for the panel majority acknowledges, the seminal opinion in this circuit on the reviewability of class action determinations is Hackett v. General Host Corp., 455 F.2d 618 (3d Cir. 1972), cert. denied, 407 U.S. 925, 92 S.Ct. 2460, 32 L.Ed.2d 812 (1972), in which we declined to adopt the so-called "death knell" rule of the Second Circuit, that an order denying a motion to permit a case to proceed as a class action may be reviewable as a collaterally final order within the meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949). But while Hackett declined to treat a negative class action determination as a final order it carefully preserved the right to seek appellate review under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1) where the denial of class certification amounts to the denial of preliminary injunctive relief. In Hackett, we specifically referred to
455 F.2d at 622. The point made in Hackett, a point that, in my view at least, was the essential justification for rejecting the Second Circuit's "death knell" rule as announced in Eisen v. Carlisle & Jacquelin, 370 F.2d 119 (2d Cir. 1966), cert. denied, 386 U.S. 1035, 87 S.Ct. 1487, 18 L.Ed.2d 598 (1967), was that in civil rights litigation, injunctive relief in favor of a single plaintiff usually would do nothing whatsoever for the remaining members of the class. A single black child might be placed in a white school, while all of the child's fellow black classmates were left in a segregated school. In such a case the denial of class action treatment would have the practical effect of denying injunctive relief to the entire class. Moreover, the key issue in such a case, and the key issue in the position taken by the panel majority, is the availability of pendente lite injunctive relief. Hackett concluded that we did not need the Eisen interpretation of § 1291 because a denial of pendente lite relief benefiting a class, in the guise of a denial of class action treatment, was reviewable under § 1292(a)(1). Now, without taking the case in banc, a panel majority has overruled the very fundamental premise on which our Hackett holding rests. It has done so, moreover, despite the fact that we reiterated that premise in Rodgers v. United States Steel Corp., 541 F.2d 365, 372-73 (3d Cir. 1976); Rodgers v. United States Steel Corp., 508 F.2d 152, 160 (3d Cir. 1975) and Samuel v. University of Pittsburgh, 506 F.2d 355, 358 n. 6 (3d Cir. 1974).
Portions of the majority's opinion indicate that, apart from the argument that the certification decision is reviewable after final judgment, the refusal to certify cannot be deemed to constitute the denial of an injunction because this refusal does not directly deny injunctive relief. In view of my conclusion that the certification decision is appealable after final judgment, I need not reach this alternative possible ground of decision. But I note that any argument that an order must directly grant or refuse injunctive relief to be appealable under § 1292(a)(1) is not readily reconcilable with General Electric Co. v. Marvel Rare Metals Corp., 287 U.S. 430, 53 S.Ct. 202, 77 L.Ed. 408 (1932), where the Supreme Court sustained the appealability of an order which dismissed a counterclaim for improper venue
In United States v. Richardson, 418 U.S. 166, 179-80, 94 S.Ct. 2940, 2947, 41 L.Ed.2d 678 (1974), the Court indicated that standing is not conferred by virtue of the fact that "if respondent is not permitted to litigate this issue, no one can do so."
In Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. at 110-11 n.11, 95 S.Ct. 854, the Court appeared to look to whether the issue was capable of repetition as to the class members, not as to the named plaintiffs
In determining that Article III does not always require that a named plaintiff's personal stake continue throughout the litigation, Sosna, 419 U.S. 393, 399, 95 S.Ct. 553, 557, 42 L.Ed.2d 532 at n.8 mentioned that "Once the suit is certified as a class action, it may not be settled or dismissed without the approval of the court."