What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
Elsie W. RUDISILL and Coal, Feed and Lumber Company, Inc., Appellants, v. SOUTHERN RAILWAY COMPANY, Appellee.
No. 76-1552.
United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.
Argued Dec. 9, 1976.
Decided Jan. 17, 1977.
James P. Erwin, Jr., Asheville, N. C. (McGuire, Wood, Erwin & Crow, Asheville, N. C., on brief), for appellants.
Robert F. Orr, Asheville, N. C. (Harold K. Bennett, Asheville, N. C., on brief), for appellee.
Before CLARK, Associate Justice, FIELD, Senior Circuit Judge, and HALL, Circuit Judge.
Tom C. Clark, Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court, Ret., sitting by designation.
PER CURIAM:
The only issue on this appeal is whether Southern Railway Company (Southern) is a citizen of North Carolina for the purposes of diversity jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332(c).
The action was originally instituted in the Superior Court of Madison County, North Carolina, to recover damages for injury to the plaintiffs’ property allegedly resulting from the derailment of a Southern freight train. Southern removed the case to the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1441, and thereafter the plaintiffs moved to remand upon the ground that Southern is a North Carolina corporation and therefore does not meet the diversity requirements.
Southern was originally incorporated in 1894 in the State of Virginia and has its principal place of business in that state. Shortly after its incorporation Southern purchased under a foreclosure sale all of the property and franchises of the Western North Carolina Railroad Company (Western), a North Carolina corporation. Sections 697 and 698 of Chapter 16 of the North Carolina Code of 1883, which were in effect at the time of the purchase, provided that the old corporation (Western) should ipso facto be dissolved, and that the purchaser should forthwith be a new corporation succeeding to all of the rights, privileges and duties of the former corporation. Southern took no affirmative steps to seek or file articles of incorporation in North Carolina until 1899. In that year the North Carolina General Assembly enacted Chapter 62, Public Acts of 1899, which required that any corporation desiring to own property or carry on business within the state “become a domestic corporation of the State of North Carolina” by filing a copy of its charter and by-laws with the secretary of state and taking certain other steps delineated in the statute. Southern filed the necessary documents with the secretary of state and otherwise complied with the statutory requirements.
In urging their motion to remand, the plaintiffs contended that Southern became a domestic corporation in North Carolina in 1899. Alternatively, they argued that since the derailment occurred on that portion of the line once owned and operated by Western, for the purposes of this particular action Southern is a domestic corporation of North Carolina by virtue of the statutory provisions of the Code of 1883. The district judge carefully reviewed the cases construing these venerable statutes and, relying primarily upon Julian v. Central Trust Company, 193 U.S. 93, 24 S.Ct. 399, 48 L.Ed. 629 (1904), and Southern Railway Company v. Allison, 190 U.S. 326, 23 S.Ct. 713, 47 L.Ed. 1078 (1903), concluded that neither the compulsory incorporation in 1899, nor the operation of the 1883 statutes defeated Southern’s diversity status. Accordingly, he denied the motion to remand. We agree with the conclusions of the district judge and affirm upon his opinion. Rudisill et al. v. Southern Railway Company, 424 F.Supp. 1102 (W.D.N.C., 1976).
AFFIRMED.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 2