Opinion ID: 159615
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Jurisdiction Over Qualified Immunity Appeals

Text: 21 As a general rule, this court has jurisdiction to review only final decisions of the district courts. See 28 U.S.C. 1291; Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 309 (1995). However, in Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 546 (1949), the Supreme Court held that certain collateral orders are appealable. In order to be appealable under the Cohen collateral order doctrine, a district court decision must: (1) conclusively determine the disputed question; (2) resolve an important issue completely separate from the merits of the action; and (3) be effectively unreviewable on appeal from a final judgment. Coopers & Lybrand v. Livesay, 437 U.S. 463, 468 (1978). 22 In Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 528 (1985), the Court applied the collateral order doctrine to decisions denying public officials' claims of qualified immunity. It held that certain decisions could be appealed by public officials--those that determined whether or not certain given facts showed a violation of clearly established law and whether, as a result, the defendant public official was entitled to qualified immunity. Johnson, 515 U.S. at 311 (discussing Mitchell). 23 In spite of Mitchell's authorization of appeals of decisions denying qualified immunity, the Supreme Court has held that there is still a class of qualified immunity rulings not immediately appealable. See id. at 319-20. In particular, a defendant, entitled to invoke a qualified immunity defense, may not appeal a district court's summary judgment order insofar as that order determines whether the pretrial record sets forth a 'genuine' issue of fact for trial. Id. at 320; see also Foote v. Spiegel, 118 F.3d 1416, 1422 (10th Cir. 1997) (discussing Johnson). When the district court's summary judgment ruling merely determines the sufficiency of the evidence offered by the plaintiff in response to the defendant's factual assertions, the appeal is unlikely to involve the kind of abstract legal issues separate from the fact-related issues that will arise at trial. Thus, many of the justifications for applying the Cohen collateral order doctrine will not be present. See Johnson, 515 U.S. at 313-20. 24 This circuit has applied this jurisdictional limitation on qualified immunity appeals. For example, in Armijo v. Wagon Mound Public Schools, 159 F.3d 1253, 1259 (10th Cir. 1998), we noted that where the district court makes a legal finding and states specific facts upon which that finding is based, we do not have jurisdiction to delve behind the ruling and review the record to determine if the district court correctly interpreted those facts to find a genuine dispute; see also Myers v. Oklahoma County Bd. of County Comm'rs, 80 F.3d 421, 424-25 (10th Cir. 1996) (concluding that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear an appeal when the district court denied summary judgment to the individual defendants on their qualified immunity defense on the sole basis that there was a genuine issue for trial regarding the reasonableness of defendants' conduct.) (internal quotations and citations omitted).