Opinion ID: 453018
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Urgency

Text: 29 The urgency prong of the Cohen test turns on whether irreparable harm would result to appellant[ ], not from the district court order itself, but from a delay in obtaining appellate review of it. Continental Investment Corporation, 637 F.2d at 5. In this instance, Fiat argues that compliance with the order would accomplish the harm and that appellate review after the completion of the main litigation would be useless. This asseveration, however, misses the point: the appellant has yet to be ordered to furnish answers to interrogatories; if such an order was to be made, it is presently unclear to what extent (if at all) the framing of answers would invade the encincture of the Hague Convention; 8 if such an invasion was to be launched, it is sheer guesswork as to what sanction (if any) might be levied; and, if a sanction emerged, such an order would presumably be final and subject to immediate appeal under 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1291. 9 See Firestone Tire and Rubber Co., 449 U.S. at 376, 101 S.Ct. at 674. See also text post at 18-19. And in this manner, Fiat may yet legitimately secure appellate review of its ostensible Hague Convention rights in the context of a final ruling, without being required to surrender them first. Denying review at this point simply does not leave the parties powerless to avert the mischief of the order. Perlman v. United States, 247 U.S. 7, 13, 38 S.Ct. 417, 419, 62 L.Ed. 950 (1918). See also Grinnell Corp., 519 F.2d at 598. Nor does it inexorably result in any irretrievable loss of the appellant's rights. 30 This court is not unaware of the paradox thus created. Though disdaining to hear Fiat's substantive jeremiad now, we may yet be required to hear it anon, in the context of, say, an appeal from a contempt citation. The operative word, however, is may: so many ifs dot the landscape that such a prediction can only be woven of the gossamer strands of vaticination, conjecture, surmise, and speculation. As previously indicated, there has been no showing that the parties, themselves, may not be able to resolve any conflict between the appellee's desire for information and the appellant's asserted rights as a foreign subject. Then, too, even in the absence of any accommodation, a fuller explication of the pertinent circumstances may reveal that no genuine impasse exists. Or, future rulings of the district court may serve to defuse the situation. Courts should not rush in where the need for them to tread is uncertain. Both patience and a due regard for the ripeness of controversies are virtues in judicial oversight. On this scumbled record, it remains entirely possible that the substantive question which Fiat urges us to reach may not, in the long run, require appellate resolution for purposes of this case (or, if it does, that it may subsequently be presented in a narrower, better ordered framework). In view of the oft-stated purpose of 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1291 to avoid piecemeal appellate disposition[s], Eisen, 417 U.S. at 170, 94 S.Ct. at 2149, the putative urgency anent this appeal, beset as it is with myriad contingencies, is much more apparent than real. Even if the appellant's present fears prove to be more than horrible imaginings, that prospect alone is not enough to circumvent the policy against scattershot review. As we have observed before, [i]f the hardships of trial are routinely held to implicate a separate interest reviewable under the collateral order doctrine, the distinction between interlocutory and final orders would be seriously undermined, if not eliminated. Lamphere v. Brown University, 553 F.2d 714, 717 (1st Cir.1977). And, should the eventuality which Fiat dreads come to pass, we doubt that the district court would threaten to enter a default judgment, thereby placing the foreign national between the devil and the deep blue sea. Rather, we see the course of prudence for a trial court, in those circumstances, as being either to issue a contempt order (which we could, without doing violence to established practices, review immediately) or to employ the prophylaxis of 28 U.S.C. Sec. 1292(b). 10 Either way, the appellant's rights would be fully protected. 31 We hold, therefore, that on the most salient furculum of the Cohen paradigm, the appellant has fallen several leagues short of making out the requisite showing of urgency and/or irreparable harm.