Opinion ID: 765124
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: City of Forest Park

Text: 30 In Swint v. Chambers County Commission, 514 U.S. 35 (1995), the Eleventh Circuit had used its discretionary pendent appellate jurisdiction to reach the denial of summary judgment to the Commission notwithstanding the fact that the denial was not independently appealable as a collateral order, but the Supreme Court reversed. The Eleventh Circuit purported to exercise pendent jurisdiction over the summary judgment in the interest of judicial economy, while it was reviewing the denial of qualified immunity to individual governmental defendants. The Supreme Court held that jurisdiction was improper in that case, however, because the two questions were unrelated -- there was no contention that the summary judgment motion was inextricably intertwined with that court's decision to deny the individual defendants' qualified immunity motions.... Id. at 51. In Swint, the two inquiries were manifestly separate: The individual defendants' qualified immunity turns on whether they violated clearly established federal law; the county commission's liability turns on the allocation of law enforcement power in Alabama. Id. 31 Such is not the case here. If the plaintiffs have failed to state a claim for violation of a constitutional right at all, then the City of Forest Park cannot be held liable for violating that right any more than the individual defendants can. The inquiry is precisely the same in both cases, and the justification for the decision in Swint is not present here. This court has used pendent appellate jurisdiction under circumstances similar to the case sub judice inBrennan v. Township of Northville, 78 F.3d 1152 (6th Cir. 1996). In Brennan, the court decided that the plaintiff had not alleged a constitutional violation, and that decision indisputably resolved the other issue appealed -- the grant of summary judgment on liability to the plaintiff. Id. at 1157-58. Without alleging a constitutional violation, Brennan could not receive summary judgment on his § 1983 claim. In fact, the Brennan court remarked on the very scenario present here -- the city in that case also had been adJudged liable on summary judgment for violating Brennan's constitutional rights, and the court indicated that it would have reached the city's claim as well, but for the fact that the city was not a party to the appeal and its summary judgment motion could not be reviewed. 32 Neither Brennan nor today's decision is contrary to Swint, which left open the possibility that two determinations (one immediately appealable and one not) could be inextricably intertwined and thus appropriately reviewed together. The Sixth Circuit is not alone in using this discretionary power post-Swint. On facts similar to those here in all relevant respects, the Tenth Circuit wrote: 33 As we read Swint, a pendent appellate claim can be regarded as inextricably intertwined with a properly reviewable claim on collateral appeal only if the pendent claim is coterminous with, or subsumed in, the claim before the court on interlocutory appeal -- that is, when the appellate resolution of the collateral appeal necessarily resolves the pendent claim as well. 34 Moore v. City of Wynnewood, 57 F.3d 924, 930 (10th Cir. 1995). Because that court decided that no constitutional violation had occurred at all, it necessarily resolved the City of Wynnewood's summary judgment motion as well. 35 The court in Moore pointed out that if it had resolved the qualified immunity question on other grounds -- i.e., that a constitutional violation had occurred but the individual defendants were entitled to qualified immunity because the law was not clearly established, or that a constitutional violation had occurred but questions remained as to whether a final policymaker was involved --then interlocutory appellate jurisdiction would have been improper. We have followed this approach in our own cases. See Brennan, 78 F.3d at 1158; Williams v. Kentucky, 24 F.3d 1526, 1542-43 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 513 U.S. 947 (1994).