Opinion ID: 77735
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Consideration of Facts Before the District Court

Text: When this court remands a case to a district court with specific factual questions to resolve, we expect the district judge to answer those questions. Because of our circuit law on inquiry notice, which includes factual determinations, we are unable to answer the interlocutory question on appeal until we know which statute of limitations controls in this case. The former statute of limitations for securities-fraud actions was within one year after the discovery of the facts constituting the violation and within three years after such violation. 15 U.S.C. § 78i(e); Lampf, Pleva, Lipkind, Prupis & Petigrow v. Gilbertson, 501 U.S. 350, 364 & n. 9, 111 S.Ct. 2773, 2782 & n. 9, 115 L.Ed.2d 321 (1991). The remedial SOA statute of limitations is (1) 2 years after the discovery of the facts constituting the violation; or (2) 5 years after such violation. 28 U.S.C. § 1658(b). To comply with our circuit inquiry-notice requirements, we asked the district judge on limited remand to make the factual determinations necessary for our legal decision on interlocutory appeal and to tell us: (1) What established inquiry notice for the plaintiff class, and when did it occur? and (2) When did the class have sufficient information to file the complaint? Although the parties produced the documentation necessary to answer these questions, including the revealing deposition of Tello, the district judge has given us no indication that he reviewed and analyzed the considerable documents produced on limited remand. Instead, he first characterizes our limited remand on interlocutory appeal from a motion to dismiss as an unusual event. [6] 1 First Supp. R. 65 at 2. Second, the judge simply recited the dates that the parties considered to be operative for inquiry notice: for the class, October 1, 2002, the date of issuance of the SEC Order; for Dean Witter, August 14, 2000, the date of publication of the Fortune article, describing specifically Dean Witter's securities fraud. The judge did not address whatsoever the documents that the parties presented to substantiate those two dates. Consequently, the judge announced that he could not determine inquiry notice, apparently based only on the evidentiary hearing. Third, seemingly ignoring the inquiry-notice issue that we sent to him for resolution, the district judge proceeded to address the statute-of-limitations issue before us on interlocutory appeal. The comments of the district judge and his failure to provide the answers to factual questions that we needed to resolve the threshold issue of inquiry notice before we can make the legal statute-of-limitations determination were unhelpful and judicially inefficient by declining to follow our specific instructions on limited remand. Many times, and in many contexts, this Court has admonished district courts that their orders should contain sufficient explanations of their rulings so as to provide this Court with an opportunity to engage in meaningful appellate review. Danley v. Allen, 480 F.3d 1090, 1091 (11th Cir.2007) (per curiam) (including cases cited in this interlocutory appeal from a motion to dismiss and remand for factfinding and legal analysis to substantiate the ruling). Because the documents produced by the parties clearly resolve the inquiry-notice issues that we wanted resolved by the district judge and because these documents were before the district judge in the first instance pursuant to his order, albeit with no apparent review, we have considered them and find the answers to our questions on limited remand to be obvious. [7] From the perspective of judicial efficiency, and because the answers to our inquiry-notice questions are abundantly evident from the testimony and documents produced by the parties on limited remand, we now use them to resolve the inquiry-notice issues so that we can proceed to decide the statute-of-limitations issue that has been presented to us on interlocutory appeal. [8]