Opinion ID: 4511551
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Our Limited Review

Text: As an initial matter, we clarify the scope of our review. Although the district court identified a discrete legal question in its order, “appellate jurisdiction 12 Case: 18-15081 Date Filed: 02/28/2020 Page: 13 of 24 [under § 1292(b)] applies to the order certified to the court of appeals, and is not tied to the particular question formulated by the district court.” Yamaha Motor Corp., U.S.A. v. Calhoun, 516 U.S. 199, 205, 116 S. Ct. 619, 623 (1996). Thus, while we “may not reach beyond the certified order,” we “may address any issue fairly included within the certified order.” Id. That said, we think it appropriate to limit our review to the discrete and abstract legal issue the district court identified. See McFarlin v. Conseco Servs., LLC, 381 F.3d 1251, 1259 (11th Cir. 2004) (“The legal question must be stated at a high enough level of abstraction to lift the question out of the details of the evidence or facts of a particular case and give it general relevance to other cases in the same area of law.”). Because we limit our review to the discrete and abstract legal issue of the TVPA’s applicability to a certain class of cases, we are not concerned with the specific factual allegations in the complaint, apart from the nature of the parties (legally detained immigrants seeking to assert claims against a private, for-profit, government contractor) and, to a lesser extent, the fact that the claims arise out of the operation of a work program required by the PBNDS. In other words, we do not address whether the complaint in this case sufficiently alleged a violation of the TVPA, assuming it applies to private contractors like CoreCivic. We also do not offer any opinion on CoreCivic’s operation of work programs generally. Indeed, we decline to address the adequacy of the complaint—or any other fact-intensive 13 Case: 18-15081 Date Filed: 02/28/2020 Page: 14 of 24 inquiry—at this stage in the litigation. See Mamani v. Berzain, 825 F.3d 1304, 1312–13 (11th Cir. 2016) (declining to address, in an interlocutory appeal, whether a complaint stated a claim for relief under the Torture Victim Protection Act because the issue did not ask the court “to decide a pure or abstract question about the TVPA itself”). 4