Opinion ID: 788088
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Scope of This Court's Review

Text: 12 On appeal, the Receivers argue that the reasons given in their motion to dismiss each independently require dissolution of the injunction. See infra note 3. The Banks object on the basis of this court's limited appellate jurisdiction, arguing that this court can only narrowly evaluate the propriety of the injunction, without reference to the Receivers' arguments. This seems deliberately to misunderstand the nature of those arguments: because each of them goes to the power of the district court to exercise jurisdiction over these actions or its discretionary responsibility to decline to do so, they all go to the merits of the injunction issued by the district court, which was premised on the proper assumption of jurisdiction. The Banks' admonition that this court should only review the propriety of the injunction, without examining whether the case was properly in the district court in the first place, defies logic. While not all of the Receivers' arguments are strictly jurisdictional in the sense of attacking the bare power of the district court to hear the case, they are all jurisdictional in the sense that they attack the propriety of the district court's assumption of jurisdiction. 3 The injunction is only proper as preventing duplicative litigation if the declaratory judgment action should have been allowed to proceed. The harm or effect of the preliminary injunction that FTB faults the Receivers for not identifying and arguing is precisely what the Receivers are in fact arguing: that for a plethora of reasons, their coercive action, the Mississippi litigation, is the proper vehicle for this dispute — the litigation which they were specifically prohibited from pursuing. 13 The Banks assert that the issues argued by the Receivers can only be recognized by this court under pendent appellate jurisdiction, which allows unappealable orders to be reviewed only when they are inextricably intertwined with appealable orders; they then argue that the grant of the preliminary injunction is not so intertwined with the motion to dismiss. See Brennan v. Township of Northville, 78 F.3d 1152, 1157-58 (6th Cir.1996). While the Receivers disclaim any reliance on the doctrine of pendent appellate jurisdiction, arguing instead that under any meaningful scheme of review an appeal from an injunction necessarily sweeps up any issues that bear on the district court's power to issue the injunction, they do correctly note that in order to reverse the district court's denial of their motion to dismiss, this court would have to find that it had pendent appellate jurisdiction over that denial. Because we conclude that the district court abused its discretion in entertaining this declaratory action, we necessarily decide that the denial of the Receivers' motion was improper, satisfying the inextricably intertwined rule. See id. at 1158 (Our finding on the first issue necessarily and unavoidably decides the second.). We will therefore remand with orders to dismiss the actions in their entirety. 14