Opinion ID: 785213
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Appellate Jurisdiction to Review the Appellate Division's Determination of Its Own Jurisdiction

Text: 28 Turning to the question of the reviewability of the Appellate Division's determination of its own jurisdiction, it is clear that we may at least review this limited question. This Court's indistinguishable precedent in Government of the Virgin Islands v. Blake, 118 F.3d 972 (3d Cir.1997), compels this conclusion. In that case, the Government had taken an interlocutory appeal from the Territorial Court to the Appellate Division under 4 V.I.Code § 39(d), a provision which allows an interlocutory appeal during trial under some circumstances. (In Blake, the Territorial Court had suppressed—during motions decided after the jury had been selected and sworn—a variety of testimony and other evidence the Government sought to present.) The Appellate Division in Blake decided that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the Government's appeal. On appeal we held that although we had no jurisdiction to reach the merits, we did have jurisdiction under the collateral order doctrine to review the Appellate Division's jurisdiction over the appeal. Blake, 118 F.3d at 975-76. We of course adhere to Blake in this case, see Third Circuit IOP 9.1, but we do add a few words of analysis since the discussion in Blake was quite summary. 29 The first prong of the collateral order doctrine is clearly satisfied here because the Appellate Division did finally determine its own jurisdiction over this sort of interlocutory appeal. The third prong is also clearly satisfied because such a determination cannot be effectively reviewed on appeal from a final judgment because, by hypothesis, the Appellate Division's jurisdiction to hear interlocutory (i.e., not final ) appeals would not be implicated in that posture. 30 The second prong is more complex, but it too favors our jurisdiction. Part of it is clear: The issue of the Appellate Division's jurisdiction is separate from the merits. Whether the question is important enough requires some discussion. On the one hand, issues involving the scope of federal jurisdiction are good candidates for the collateral order doctrine. See, e.g., Quackenbush v. Allstate Ins. Co., 517 U.S. 706, 116 S.Ct. 1712, 135 L.Ed.2d 1 (1996) (holding that an abstention-based remand to state court was immediately appealable under collateral order doctrine). On the other hand, a vague reference to the scope of federal jurisdiction may denominate the category too broadly, for the cases involving the collateral order doctrine and the scope of federal jurisdiction are by and large abstention cases, see id. at 712-15, 116 S.Ct. 1712 (canvassing cases), which put the litigants `effectively out of court,' id. at 713, 116 S.Ct. 1712 (quoting Moses H. Cone Mem'l Hosp. v. Mercury Contr. Corp., 460 U.S. 1, 11 n. 11, 103 S.Ct. 927, 74 L.Ed.2d 765 (1983) (quoting Idlewild Bon Voyage Liquor Corp. v. Epstein, 370 U.S. 713, 715 n. 2, 82 S.Ct. 1294, 8 L.Ed.2d 794 (1962))), and some courts have explicitly held that non-immunity based motions to dismiss for want of subject matter jurisdiction are not ordinarily entitled to interlocutory review. Merritt v. Shuttle, Inc., 187 F.3d 263, 268 (2d Cir.1999) (citing Catlin, 324 U.S. at 236, 65 S.Ct. 631). 31 The dispositive differences in this case are twofold. First, we are considering the ability to appeal an interlocutory determination of appellate jurisdiction, not original jurisdiction, making cases like Merritt distinguishable. Second, the order at issue here is not so much effectively unreviewable as it is procedurally unreviewable if we do not take jurisdiction now. Effective unreviewability arises because a party's putative rights will be irreparably harmed. For example, a party may have to forego an injunction guarding against irreparable harm because the security bond that is the price of the injunction may have been made too costly by the lower court; or a party wrongly determined to lack qualified immunity may be subjected to a trial. In such situations, although the aggrieved party cannot be made whole after the fact, the legal question will, as a matter of procedure, still be preserved for the appellate court's review at a later time. In contrast, only in the most convoluted and improbable of hypotheticals will the jurisdictional issue presented here ever make its way to this Court on appeal from a final decision. 7 As a procedural matter, now is this Court's only opportunity to pass on the issue. 32 This reasoning also explains why our holding here would not apply to the issue in Merritt, i.e., why a district court's determination of its subject matter jurisdiction is not generally reviewable under the collateral order doctrine. 8 Questions of original jurisdiction are always automatically before this Court on appellate review. See, e.g., Wujick v. Dale & Dale, Inc., 43 F.3d 790, 792 (3d Cir.1994) (`[E]very federal appellate court has a special obligation to satisfy itself not only of its own jurisdiction, but also that of lower courts in a cause under review.' (alteration in original) (quoting Spring Garden Assoc., L.P. v. Resolution Trust Corp., 26 F.3d 412, 415 (3d Cir.1994) (quoting Employers Ins. of Wausau v. Crown Cork & Seal Co., 905 F.2d 42 (3d Cir.1990)))). In other words, there is no procedural posture where a question of original jurisdiction will escape this Court's review in an appeal from a (non-interlocutory) final decision. In contrast—as this case itself illustrates—there are procedural postures which render permanently unreviewable the judgment of a hierarchically inferior appellate court, 9 and thereby prevent the automatic review of jurisdiction described in Wujick. Because review of a question of appellate jurisdiction is a now-or-never proposition, interlocutory review of a jurisdictional question is warranted here where it is not warranted in the case of a district court's determination of its own original jurisdiction. 33 In brief, coupled with the institutional importance of the question, the absolute unreviewability of the Appellate Division's jurisdiction in this case makes the question an important one. Thus this prong too favors appealability. Because all three prongs are satisfied, the collateral order doctrine affords us a basis for reviewing the Appellate Division's determination regarding its jurisdiction under 4 V.I.Code § 39(a)(1). 34 In reaching this conclusion, we have considered the dissent's contention that our decision effectively grants an appeal as of right to question an appellate court's jurisdiction whenever it makes an interlocutory ruling, and that this result is the very sort of inefficiency that the collateral order doctrine should not countenance. We are underwhelmed by the dissent's in terrorem argument. First, it is a dubious empirical proposition that the holding here will increase the quantity of this sort of appeal. As the citations in the opinion in this case suggest, this Court has seen but a handful of cases like this in the past decade. Second, the fact that we here take the opportunity to give some guidance (both to litigants and to the Appellate Division) should decrease, not increase, the number of appeals taken in good faith. 35 Third, the dissent claims that [t]he majority's decision effectively grants an appeal as of right. But it is the Congress, not this Court, that has granted litigants an appeal as of right from the Appellate Division. Even if we did dismiss this appeal in its entirety for lack of jurisdiction, as the dissent would, little efficiency would be gained as a practical matter: In a subsequent case, a litigant could still file a notice of appeal (as a matter of statutory right), and he could still advance a good faith argument in favor of review under the collateral order doctrine. A motions panel would likely refer the jurisdictional question to the merits panel, and the merits panel would address the question (hopefully in less extended fashion than we have had to here). In other words, the decision here makes it neither easier nor harder for a party who is dissatisfied with the ruling of the Appellate Division to drag out the process by appealing to this Court. 10 36 At bottom, it seems to us that the dissent's problem is the presence of a system of two-tier appellate review as of right. In fact, the dissent states explicitly that [t]his type of review is wisely not found elsewhere in the federal system, and should not exist here. Dissenting Op. post at 328. While we might agree with the dissent if we were drafting 48 U.S.C. § 1613a, that simply is not our task. Congress has provided that we have appellate jurisdiction (until such time as the conditions for certiorari jurisdiction are met, see 48 U.S.C. § 1613), and accordingly, we will turn our attention to the substance of the appeal.