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:
AMERICAN TRAIN DISPATCHERS ASSOCIATION, Petitioner, v. INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION and United States of America, Respondents, Burlington Northern, Inc., Intervenor.
No. 77-1222.
United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit.
Argued March 20, 1978.
Decided May 1, 1978.
Gordon P. MaeDougall, Washington, D. C., for petitioner.
Mark L. Evans, Gen. Counsel, I.C.C., Washington, D. C., for respondents; Robert S. Burk and Frederick W. Read, III, Associate Gen. Counsels, Kenneth G. Caplan, Atty., I.C.C., John J. Powers, III, and Susan J. Atkinson, Attys., Dept, of Justice, Washington, D. C., were on the brief.
Charles H. White, Jr., and Henry F. Rush, Attys., I.C.C., Washington, D. C., entered an appearance for I.C.C.
Carl D. Lawson, Atty., Dept, of Justice, Washington, D. C., entered an appearance for U. S.
Barry McGrath, St. Paul, Minn., for inter-venor.
Before WRIGHT, Chief Judge, and LEV-ENTHAL and ROBB, Circuit Judges.
Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge LEVENTHAL.
LEVENTHAL, Circuit Judge:
This is a petition to review an order of the Interstate Commerce Commission that construes portions of the Interstate Commerce Act dealing with job protection for railroad employees affected by a merger.
In 1967, the Commission approved the so-called “Northern Lines Merger,” Great N.P. & Burlington Lines, Inc. Merger, 331 I.C.C. 228 (1967). In its order, the Commission imposed certain conditions designed to protect employees of the merged railroads whose job status might be affected by the merger. Section 5(2)(f) of the Interstate Commerce Act, 49 U.S.C. § 5(2)(f), requires the Commission to impose such protective conditions in approving a merger.
Petitioner American Train Dispatchers Association represents nine employees of Burlington Northern (BN), the railroad that resulted from this merger. Of these nine train dispatchers, three were hired by BN subsequent to the merger. The other six were employed as telegraphers at the time of the merger, and were later promoted to dispatchers. The question before us is whether these employees are entitled to enjoy protective conditions imposed by the Commission as a condition of the merger. Its resolution necessarily turns on the meaning of section 5(2)(f) of the Act:
As a condition of its approval, under this paragraph (2), of any transaction involving a carrier or carriers by railroad subject to the provisions of this part, the Commission shall require a fair and equitable arrangement to protect the interests of the railroad employees affected. In its order of approval the Commission shall include terms and conditions providing that during the period of four years from the effective date of such order such transaction will not result in employees of the carrier or carriers by railroad affected by such order being in a worse position with respect to their employment, except that the protection afforded to any employee pursuant to this sentence shall not be required to continue for a longer period, following the effective date of such order, than the period during which such employee was in the employ of such carrier or carriers prior to the effective date of such order. Notwithstanding any other provisions of this Act, an agreement pertaining to the protection of the interests of said employees may hereafter be entered into by any carrier or carriers by railroad and the duly authorized representative or representatives of its or their employees.
Petitioner urges that the first sentence of this subsection mandates protection for all employees affected by a merger, without limitation as to date of employment or promoted status. Under this reading, the three employees hired after the merger would be entitled to protection; and the six who were promoted after the merger would be protected in their promoted status. Petitioner concedes that the Commission has discretion under § 5(2)(f) in applying the “fair and equitable” standard, but insists that these employees are entitled as a matter of law to some protection, with Commission discretion only as to the degree of protection.
This construction is unwarranted by the language of the statute or its legislative history. It will serve no purpose to review that history in detail, since no part of it bears directly on the question before us. Suffice it to say that Congress, in promulgating this legislation, was clearly concerned with the fact that merger economies would be achieved largely at the expense of displaced labor. That the question of post-merger employees occurred to the legislators at all seems doubtful.
Against this dubious backdrop, petitioner asks us to support a reading of the statutory language that is of potentially breathtaking scope. Protection could extend to employees hired many years after the merger, if they were “affected” by it. Nor does the “affected” requirement provide a satisfactory limiting principle, since consolidations and other economies instituted long after the merger might well be traced back to it in some sense. The principle urged by petitioner, in short, threatens to vitiate in large measure the economies that the merger was designed to achieve. We reject it.
Petitioner contends alternatively that the Commission has discretionary authority to afford protection to post-merger employees and to employees promoted after the merger, and that it failed adequately to explain its refusal to exercise this authority. We need not decide whether the Commission has such authority, or from which provision it derives, for it is clear that all members of the Commission are unanimous that it is not appropriate to exercise whatever discretion it may have so as to give retroactive protection to the nine employees here in question. The basis for that discretionary determination may be adequately discerned in terms of the inequity of retroactive insertion of conditions not contained in either the merger agreement or the 1967 ICC order, as contrasted with a supplemental order under § 5(10) in the nature of clarification, and of the threat to labor cost savings that such augmented protective conditions would pose.
Affirmed.
. Petitioner does not seem to argue that the protection provided for the employees in question must necessarily be coextensive with that provided for those who were employees before the merger and have not been promoted.
The parties agree that the second sentence of § 5(2)(f) is not applicable to the employees in question, since the present impact (if any) of the merger on these employees does not occur within four years of the order approving the merger.
. We do not consider whether employees who were on board at the time of the merger might have a claim to protection even of a post-merger promotion on the ground that their status as of the merger date included a legitimate expectancy of promotion in the normal course of events meriting protection. No such contention was argued to the court.
. See Colorado Interstate Gas Co. v. FPC, 324 U.S. 581, 65 S.Ct. 829, 89 L.Ed. 1206 (1945); Greater Boston Television Corp. v. FCC, 143 U.S.App.D.C. 383, 393, 444 F.2d 841, 851 (1970), cert. denied, 403 U.S. 923, 91 S.Ct. 2229, 29 L.Ed.2d 701 (1971).
. In Chesapeake and Ohio Ry. Co. et al. v. ICC, 187 U.S.App.D.C. 241, 571 F.2d 1190 (D.C.Cir. 1977), the court found the supplemental order to be a clarification.
. As indicated, it is unnecessary for us to decide whether such discretionary authority, if it exists, is to be found in § 5(2)(b), as the majority of the Commission believed, or in § 5(2)(f), as Commissioner O’Neal appeared to accept, in his concurrence to the order here appealed.

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: 0