Opinion ID: 77376
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: CAFA Review of Remand Orders

Text: 7 The CAFA permits a court of appeals to accept an application to appeal if the application is made to the court of appeals  not less than 7 days after entry of the [district court's] order granting or denying a motion to remand a class action to the state court from which it was removed. 28 U.S.C. § 1453(c)(1) (emphasis added). Several circuits have declined to read the not less than language literally, concluding that it was a typographical error, or that such a reading would be illogical. See Pritchett v. Office Depot, Inc. 420 F.3d 1090, 1093 n. 2 (10th Cir.2005) (The statute should read that an appeal is permissible if filed `not more than' seven days after entry of the remand order.); Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309, AFL-CIO v. Laidlaw Transit Servs., Inc., 435 F.3d 1140, 1146 (9th Cir.2006) (following Pritchett and also excluding, in calculating the 7-day period, intermediate weekends and holidays under Fed. R.App. P. 26(a)(2)); cf. Patterson v. Dean Morris, L.L.P., 444 F.3d 365, 368 n. 1 (5th Cir. 2006). While we have not addressed this issue directly, it is clear that we did not read § 1453(c)(1) literally in Evans, where we stated that § 1453(c)(1) provides for an `application' to the court of appeals . . . within 7 days of the district court's remand order. Evans, 449 F.3d at 1162, 2006 WL 1374688, at  (emphasis added). We now reaffirm that construction of § 1453(c)(1), for to read it literally would produce an absurd result: there would be a front-end waiting period (an application filed 6 days after entry of a remand order would be premature), but there would be no back-end limit (an application filed 600 days after entry of a remand order would not be untimely). When applying the plain and ordinary meaning of statutory language produces a result that is not just unwise but is clearly absurd, another principle comes into the picture. That principle is the venerable one that statutory language should not be applied literally if doing so would produce an absurd result. Merritt v. Dillard Paper Co., 120 F.3d 1181, 1188 (11th Cir.1997). Here, the district court's remand order was entered on April 4, 2006. Maytag filed its petition for permission to appeal (i.e., its application) with the circuit clerk on April 12, 2006— six days later, when the intervening weekend is excluded under Fed. R.App. P. 26(a)(2). Accordingly, there was no violation of § 1453(c)(1) when we granted Maytag's petition.
8 The CAFA requires us to complete all action on [this] appeal, including rendering judgment, not later than 60 days after the date on which such appeal was filed, unless an extension is granted . . . . 28 U.S.C. § 1453(c)(2). 2 In granting Maytag's petition for permission to appeal, we directed the parties to address the question of whether the sixty-day period is measured from the date the petition is filed, or instead is measured from the date of entry of this order. Evans, however, has now decided that issue, holding that the 60-day period begins to run from the date when the court of appeals granted the appellants' application to appeal and thus filed the appeal. 449 F.3d at 1162, 2006 WL 1374688, at . We granted Maytag's petition for permission to appeal on April 25, 2006. Thus, so long as our ruling on this appeal is issued within 60 days of that date (assuming no extension is granted), our ruling is timely. 9